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This class examines the politics of popular culture in modern Japan. Over the course of the semester,

we will consider pieces of literature, film, music, and visual culture in a range of historical contexts.

The first half of our course will take us from the realm of 17th and 18th century urban life in Edo to

the violent age of wartime and empire in the early 20th century. The latter half of the course will then

examine the politics of popular culture in more recent contexts leading up to (and including) our own

age of globalization today.

Ranging over this vast and various cultural historical territory, we will develop an understanding of

how the history of modern media has shaped the popular cultural imagination in Japan, and beyond.

We will compare live theater to the mechanically reproducible art of recorded music, for example, and

look at how the solitary experience of literary reading that was enabled by the rise of print capitalism

contrasts with the collective catharsis of screened spectacle. We will follow the global flows of styles

and sensibilities that seem to open up limitless possibilities at the same time that we will trace the

specter of censorship that has always stalked pop culture.

In pursuing these inquires, our study of the history of popular culture in Japan will help us to

understand how politics and pleasure have circulated through the same conduits created by the

modern culture industry.

This course offers a survey of major religious traditions of Asia (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism). It focuses on the historical development of their beliefs, practices, rituals, and customs in their social contexts. The course will combine lectures with class discussions on readings. At the end of the semester, students will have a basic knowledge of the beliefs and practices of those religious traditions, have read important religious texts and discussed issues pertinent to the religions’ adherents, and have a more refined sense of how the category “religion” may be applied. All this enables students to develop a greater awareness of global cultural diversity and will, hopefully, spark the desire to study some of those religions more deeply.

Readings:

TBD

Introduction to Chinese Civilization and Culture

Course Description:

This course will provide an introduction to major concepts and ideas from Chinese cultural traditions to construct a course inquiry into understanding Chinese culture and society. A guiding principle in this course inquiry will be to investigate the past to help inform the present.   Lectures and discussion will examine key concepts from art, history, language, literature, and thought that greatly shaped, and continue to influence, “Chinese” cultural and geopolitical entities.  

Required Text:

Harold Tanner, China: A History: Volume I. Hackett Publishing. Available in Print and Digital editions.

Other sources available on Canvas course site.

Description

This course is designed as an introductory overview of Korean history, culture, and society from ancient times to the present.  It aims also to encourage students to locate their knowledge about Korea in relation to perspectives from other disciplines, while thinking critically about how history, culture, and society are understood.  This class has no prerequisites.

Survey of postwar Japanese politics; the occupation, governmental institutions, interest groups, protest movements, industrial policy, the government-business relationship, and political and economic reform.

This course will provide a historical and cross-cultural overview of the relationship between feminine and religious cultural expressions through comparative examinations and analyses of various goddess figures in world religions.  We will begin our study in Asia; specifically in India, where goddess worship is a vital part of contemporary Hinduism in all parts of the subcontinent.  From the goddesses of the Hindu tradition (K?l? and Laks?m?, for example), we will move on to female figures in the Buddhist Mah?y?na pantheon (such as Kuan-Yin, popular in China, Korea, and Japan), and then on to some of the goddesses of western antiquity (Inanna, Isis, Athena, Aphrodite, and Mary in her aspects as mother and intercessor).  We will end the course with a study of contemporary goddess worship in the United States as an important expression of Neo-Paganism.  Issues relating to gender, sexuality, power, and violence (domestic and political) will be emphasized as themes throughout the course.

With its emphasis on vegetarianism, its modern discourse on ecology and its regard for all life-forms, Jainism is commonly and justly known as the religion of non-violence. Having its historical origins in North India about 25OO years ago, Jainism is an ancient but thriving religion. It has a distinctive community of both male and female ascetics and a supporting community of laypeople. Jainism’s unique theory of karma, ethics of non-violence (ahimsa), and its multisided approach (anekantavada) to truth and reality have influenced in some way or other all major religions and orthodox philosophical traditions in India.

This course will introduce students to this fascinating religion by examining its history, doctrines, philosophical tenets and religious practices. Students will learn about Jainism’s dynamic contribution to the religious and cultural heritage of South Asia. Readings will be drawn from primary sources, contemporary Jain writings and secondary scholarly literature. In the second part of the course, we will move on to a thematic discussion of Jainism. Themes will center on gendered experience of religion, devotion and divinity, the relationship between laypeople and monastics, pilgrimage and festivals, Jain views on life and death, its ethics of non-violence and its modern discourse on ecology. This thematic approach will encourage students to engage with these various themes from the perspectives of their own background and interests. Each student will write a research paper and give a class presentation on a topic of her or his choice.

In this course we will discuss the songs of major saints and their role in shaping the religious communities of India. Bhakti (or Devotion)–which is passionate love towards god–is very much a part of the religious lives of Indians and their popular culture. Bhakti is often thought to be a movement against restrictive social and scriptural norms. Looking critically at the idea of this so called “Bhakti movement”–that is understood as a force binding the south to the north, together with other parts of India–we will read and compare devotional songs from different geographical and linguistic regions of India from the 9^th to 18^th century. These include: Kabīr, Tulsīdās and Sūrdās (from the northern side of India), Mīrā (Rajasthan), Narsiṁha Mehtā (Gujarat), Tukārām (Maharashtra), Nānak (Punjab), Rāmprasād (Bengal) and Āṇṭāl from Tamil Nadu. The list is not exhaustive, but these selections will give us a good introduction to how holy men and women expressed their religiosity through the medium of songs and poetry over the centuries. All these works will be studied in translations. 

Description: The Indian Subcontinent can teach us a great deal about diversity in the cultures of the past. It also teaches us about the conditions under which such diversity can be lost. For these reasons, we need to understand the carving out of the Indian subcontinent into separate political units called India and Pakistan respectively (in 1947-50). The course begins with ‘caste’ and ‘religion’ in the subcontinent, moves to the gradual consolidation of British colonialism, the redrawing of social, economic, religious, political boundaries and identities and ends with the growth of modern political forms such as political parties, and end with the cataclysms of Partition in 1947.
 
Aims: 1) to acquaint students with basic concepts and a simplified chronology of events, people, and processes.
2) teach students the importance of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ sources in the understanding of any past
3) encourage students to think critically by exposing them to a variety of perspectives on the past, including some key controversies around each of the themes of the course.



Requirements. On days marked ‘Read’ in the syllabus, students are required to read a compulsory number of pages in a given text in each topic before they come to class. They will be required to purchase/borrow/ rent the following
    1    Barbara and Thomas Metcalf, A Concise History of India, (3rd edition) Cambridge University Press, (2012 paperback), ISBN-13 978-1-107-67218-5
 
All other readings are on Canvas OR on recommended websites for particular days.
 
PLEASE NOTE: NO LAPTOPS/IPADS/IPHONES WILL BE ALLOWED TO STUDENTS IN THIS CLASS.  

Grading is based on attendance and class-participation (40 points), four-page report on five American newspaper reports on an Indian event (10 points), in-class mid-terms and finals (20+30 points respectively). Letter grades of A, B, C, D and F will be assigned on the basis of the performance.

This course looks at the history and culture of the Himalayan region, including the northern hills of India, (briefly) sections of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Tibet but especially Nepal. Some understanding of Asian history, politics and religion will be helpful (but not necessary) as our attempt will not be a comprehensive survey of the region. The Himalayas have been the site of a great deal of anthropological attention and as such we will be simultaneously be exploring several key theoretical, historical and methodological issues within the discipline of anthropology as we learn about places and people in the region. Particular attention will be paid to the area as a site for exoticism by the Occident (as the Shangri-la phenomenon), development politics, the environment, mountaineering and tourism as well as the current political tensions in the region. At the conclusion of the class, students should have a stronger idea of the important role this area has played in the political, religious and social imagination of the world and an appreciation of concepts such as ritual theory, social movements, modernity and gender studies.

This class explores alternative research methods and spatialities, in an attempt to produce new understandings of how people live in an increasingly mobile world. While mobility is a desire for many, it is also restricted and dangerous for others. This class will take movement as an object of study, rather than a particular space or identity. An introduction to the developing field of mobilities research will begin the class, including key thinkers like John Urry, Pal Nyiri, Tim Cresswell and Noel Salazar. The central portion of the course will examine how this new approach to movement allows scholars to rethink simplistic ideas of migration and to see process of circular and impermanent movement. In particular, we will be looking at topics often neglected in migration theory, such as educational migration, infrastructural and legal barriers to mobility, transnational borders and identity in situations of mobility. Cases will be drawn from movements within Asia, those between Asia and elsewhere, and those with an Asian imaginary.

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Classical Chinese Philosophy for Contemporary Times

Course description

The 6th-2nd second centuries BCE were a golden age for Chinese philosophy, an era when the key

ideas, terms, and texts that were to prove fundamental to the development of Chinese intellectual

history took shape. While philosophy from different times and cultural contexts can often seem

alien or abstruse, in fact ancient Chinese thinkers have much to teach us when it comes to

navigating sociopolitical issues and ethical concerns in our own time. In this course we will

reconstruct and reenact the most important debates in early Chinese philosophy, reapplying them

to some of the pressing questions and important events that preoccupy us today. In the process,

we will study classical Chinese philosophy not just as the intellectual product of a certain

historical and cultural context, but also as a repertoire of ideas and strategies that can be used to

enrich our experiences and confront problems in our everyday lives.

This course is open to all students. All discussion and readings for this course will be in English;

no prior knowledge of Chinese language, history, or culture is required.

Required readings

There are three required textbooks for this course:

• Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, ed. Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van

Norden. Second Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006 [hereafter Readings].

o Read all assigned pages in advance of meeting one each week.

• Bryan W. Van Norden. Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. Indianapolis:

Hackett Publishing, 2011 [hereafter Introduction].

o Read all assigned pages in advance of meeting one each week.

• Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh. The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Tell

us About the Good Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

o Consult the relevant passages in advance of each debate in meeting two of each

week.

Additional readings, materials, and resources will be made available on Canvas.

This class explores various interpretations, methods, and policies of development mainly focusing on the cases of East and Southeast Asia. We will trace the history of development as a post-war international project that emerged in the context of decolonization since the 1940s. Particular attentions will be given to the state-driven developmentalism in East and Southeast Asia, intertwined with the Cold War geopolitics, decolonization, post-colonial desires, economic development, and the US-led neocolonizing capitalist incorporation of the greater Asia region. Then we will move to practices of development/counter-development/post-development in the era of globalization and neoliberalism. Topics included land, labor and livelihood struggles; race, gender, power; activism and social movements; transnational development and the reinterpretation of foreign aid; and civil society and the future of the state.

Course Description:

Drawing from a comparative framework of the literature, film, and media of East Asia, this course takes a humanities-based approach to examine the relationship between humans and the environment. In examining works of fiction, documentary, and testimony from East Asia (including but not limited to China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the larger Pacific region), this course considers legacies of industry and war, environmental degradation and recovery, and disasters both natural and human-made. In doing so, this course places a particular emphasis on works from 1945 to the present, the relationship between humans, the economy, and the environment, and what kinds of futures can be imagined within our current moment.

This is a three-part course that examines the shifting nature of modernity between precolonial and colonial periods in the Indian subcontinent. The first part immerses students in plural ways of thinking, inhabiting and performing gender. They will be asked to read Sufi and Bhakti poetry, distinguish between biological personhood and social selfhood, place relationships of men and women in wider matrixes of kinship, caste-jati, economy and class formations. The second part will enable students to explore British colonial legal, administrative and economic processes in 1700-1900. These processes reconstituted older codes of gender as well as the structures within which women experienced marriage, abortion, inheritance, divorce and death. In the final segment, each student will evaluate how these developments empowered some women while disabling others. They will learn to assess the contradictory movements by undertaking direct research into one of the reform movements of the nineteenth or twentieth century, or by writing a review essay based on the available books on this theme in the UT library.

Required Reading: 1 text book, 1 novel, and multiple articles and primary documents posted by the instructor on Canvas ( Students must buy:  Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (Cambridge University Press, revised edition) and  Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice Candy Man (older title) Cracking India (new title, Penguin Books, 1989, 1991, 2006).

Required Written Work: 1 map quiz (10), 2 short responses (20) , 1 mid-term with IDs (30), 1 final essay (20).

Grading is based on Attendance (10), in-class discussion of a document (10), and all segments of written work (80)

The republic of India was by far the largest and most diverse of the many Asian and African states that took shape in the retreat of formal Western empire after 1945. One out of every six humans alive today live in it. It emerged in unpropitious circumstances of bloodshed and acute poverty, but has almost uniquely avoided both civil war and dictatorship through the decades that followed. Students in this course will explore the dangers that beset the fledgling democracy and the many efforts to sustain and widen it. They will especially consider the working of the electoral system. They will also study India’s efforts at equitable economic development in a changing world.

Textbook: Ramachandra Guha India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. 10^th Anniversary Edition, revised and expanded. New York: Harper Collins, 2018. E-BOOK available at Google. Other readings will be available via Canvas.

The course will be taught as a Hybrid course. It requires regular participation and active learning. The class will be divided into two sections; one meeting the instructor on Tue and the other Thu each week in the assigned classroom. Lectures will mainly be delivered via Zoom. Exams, quizzes and tests will conducted via Canvas. Office hours may be remote but will also be held on campus, Tue and Thu.

This course has been assigned a Global Cultures Flag

An introduction to the international relations of East and Southeast Asia, with particular attention to postwar economic and security issues, the changing political landscape of the post-Cold War period, and the development and functions of regional institutions.

In this course, we examine how various groups of people understood, experienced, and imagined concepts such as “the East” and “Asia,” with a primary focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When and where did these concepts emerge? How did their meanings change over time? What kind of political, economic and cultural activities did the concepts of “the East” and “Asia” generate among diverse peoples of “the East” and “Asia”? How did the concept impact these peoples’ collective identities? Answering these questions requires us to study diverse groups of people, from the Romantics in early nineteenth-century Germany to Malaysian and Singaporean statesmen in the 1980s, from nineteenth-century Japanese reformers to early twentieth-century Chinese, Indian, and Central Asian revolutionaries. Our aim is not to study a comprehensive overview of modern Asian history. Rather, we will explore how the shared identity as “Easterners” and “Asians” emerged and transformed among people who did not see themselves as such until the nineteenth century. By studying this subject, we aim to think critically about the geographical and cultural boundaries that we tend to take for granted in twenty-first century America. More generally, our aim is to learn to think of ourselves as citizens of a larger world by gaining the ability to comprehend how people remote from ourselves understand, experience, and imagine their lives.

Urbanization in East Asia has taken place in rapid, massive and turbulent ways. The purpose of this class lies in employing urbanization as an analytical category through which we can examine development, modernization, the politics of accumulation and distribution, state-­‐society relations, urban struggles and activism in East Asia. The class lectures are organized, therefore, around topics rather than by country and city. For more critical examinations, we will also learn and discuss key concepts in Geography and Urban Studies, such as modernity, uneven development, place-­‐making, gentrification, cultural agglomeration, global cities, and urban social movements. Reading various books and articles on urban issues, this course aims to advance the understanding of East Asia’s contemporary dynamics and East Asia in global context. We will supplement our readings by drawing various other materials including maps and illustrations, films, and video clips of TV programs.

Individual instruction for Asian studies majors and nonmajors. Discussion, research, and the writing of papers about various general and specialized Asian subjects.  Prerequisite: Six semester hours of coursework in Asian studies and
written consent of instructor on form obtained from the undergraduate adviser.

Comparing religions is nothing new. Religious people have always compared their beliefs and practices with those of their neighbors, sometimes with a sincere religious interest, sometimes only to claim the superiority of their own religion. When the academic discipline of Religious Studies was established in the late 19th century, scholars sought to compare without favoring a particular religious tradition. They were struck by the fact that the religions of the world seemed to have similar – or completely different – answers to the same existential questions. Some religious expressions (beliefs, practices, literature, art, institutions, etc.) appeared drastically different and others strikingly similar. Some scholars wondered if comparing religions would reveal a common sacred truth that underlay all the diverse forms of religious phenomena, while others warned that assuming such a religious essence was not an analytical but rather a religious assertion. Critics of comparison say that by alleging analogies in other cultures Western scholars impose their own concepts on those cultures, while comparativists insist that because all scholarly categories are comparative, comparison is indispensable. Analyzing those debates, this course will explore the risks and benefits of comparison in the study of religion. We will discuss and evaluate potential goals of a comparative study and develop ways in which it may be conducted both responsibly and productively. Numerous examples from Asian and other religions will enrich the discussions. During the course of the semester, students will also develop individual comparative projects.

Readings: Course packet

Grading:
Attendance/participation: 25%
Reading responses: 20%
Oral presentation: 10%
Research project: 45%

The focus of this course is on various recent and contemporary manifestations of “the Koreas in the world, and the world in the Koreas.” We begin with various historical formations of Korean out- and return migration, notably encompassing both Koreas. From there, we go on to look at various movements of people, products, ideas, and institutions in the last twenty years. These include labor and marriage migration from and to the Koreas, educational sojourning (and so-called “kirogi” families split by the practice), transnational adoption, tourism, international sport, and media flows (e.g., the “Korean Wave”).

This seminar examines the development of the field in the past five decades or so and the changing perspectives on major historical events and issues in the recent Chinese past.  Focusing on reading and discussion of the significant and innovative works, this course covers the major topics on late Qing and Republican China, including: ethnicity and identity; state-making and local politics; peasant economy and community; women and gender; urban culture and society; and rebellion and revolution.  Particular attention is paid to how the various political forces in China as well as historians inside and outside the country interpret history differently for varying political and academic purposes.

This graduate-level seminar will introduce students to the craft of literary translation through a wide variety of approaches.  Over the course of the semester, we will read various tracts, articles, and books on the theory and craft of translation from a wide range of Euro-American and South Asian stances and viewpoints.  We will analyze editions of various classics from India that have been translated into English repeatedly, paying particular attention to the political nature of the act and art of translation in its colonial and post-colonial contexts. 

This seminar will also have a practical component, and one hour of our meeting period each week will allos students to present translations-in-progress to their peers for comment and critique. 

Graduate standing required.  Students must have a good working knowledge of at least one South Asian language, classical and/or modern.

Study of various Asian studies-related topics that do not focus on any single geographic region.  Specific offerings are listed in the Course Schedule.  Prerequisite: Graduate standing; additional prerequisites vary with the topic and are given in the Course Schedule.

Core Readings and Methods in Asian Studies. Various theories and methods used in the field of Asian studies, including disciplinary history, controversies, and the diversity of approaches within the field.