Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An interdisciplinary course that examines how empire, migration, and globalization have transformed Asia through connecting Asian people and places with each other and the world. Explores such interactions as part of histories of nationalism, trade, communalism, revolution, war, and authoritarianism in Asia; and as incubators of cultural exchange and experimentation. Breadth-Humanities/Social Sciences.

COURSE DETAILS:

In this course, we will explore how empire, migration, and globalization have transformed Asia by studying about how societies and people responded to the major changes that took place in (mainly) the 1900s and 2000s. We will look at the diaries and records of fascinating individuals including royalty, pirates and just people who had a serious case of wanderlust - alongside the backdrop of the world they were travelling in. Rather than attempt a comprehensive account (which would be impossible!), we will think through the many dimensions and complex implications of these histories by delving into case studies from across the continent.

The course is divided into 4 modules. The first will look at how we can look at transnational travels, “encounters” and relationships to look at how Asia did not just “become” global but was involved in the making of the modern world and has always been one of the “ghosts” present at the table in the making of what we now call Western modernity. We will explain this admittedly dense concept through case studies, by looking at the networks, relationships, diasporas and travelers who formed the world around the Indian Ocean. Against this background the second module will look at how the development of an international system of law and capitalist production was produced by the tangled and connected world in which Asia’s connections to the world were renegotiated. We will study this by focusing on case studies of pirates, commodities like tea and cotton, and the relationship between the rise of US imperialism and wars in Asia. The third module will look at the development of individual nation states, drawing attention to the many different aspirations that existed in this time and how they had to compete to be part of the new laws being forged. We will focus on the formation of competing borders that divided people based on which side of the border they were on. Finally, we will consider contemporary issues today exploring how Asian identity is created through brands and online interactions and expressed in regional conflicts. Throughout the course, students will gain practice working with scholarship and creative works about and from Asia.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

— Discuss key developments across modern Asia from a border-crossing, global, and interdisciplinary perspective.

— Use key theoretical concepts in Global Asian Studies to trace the globalizing processes that connected Asian places, people, and societies with each other; and the world, such as imperialism, modernity, cosmopolitanism, and capitalism.

— Critically evaluate differing accounts of contentious issues and events with curiosity, empathy, and self-awareness.

— and Work closely with scholarship to write clear, well-argued expository essays about complex human phenomena.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

The course has no textbook. However, this book (linked below) is a good background text that can give an overview of international relations across Asia as well as country level histories. This is optional reading, only if you need to orient yourself in geography/time after the lectures.

Background text:

Alice Lyman Miller and Richard Wich. Becoming Asia: Change and Continuity in Asian International Relations since World War II (Stanford, 2011).