• East Asian History Journal

May 10, 1857 Indians trained by the British as soldiers, heard rumors that the cartridges for their new Enfield rifles were greased with lard and beef fat. Since the cow is sacred to Hindus, and the pig is abhorrent to Muslims, all the sepoys were outraged, and they mutinied. Although initially the mutiny was spontaneous, it quickly became more organized and the sepoys even took over the cities of Delhi and Kanpur. This mutiny was harshly crushed by the British. On September 20, 1857, the British recaptured Delhi, and in the following months, the British recaptured Kanpur and withstood a Sepoy siege of Lucknow.

This course provides an overview of Chinese martial arts fiction and film from earliest times to the present day. The focus will be on the close-reading of literary, art-historical, and cinematic texts, but will also include discussion of the significance of these works against their broader historical and social background.

Topics to be discussed: the literary/cinematic pleasure of watching violence, the relationship between violence and the law, gender ambiguity and the woman warrior, the imperial and (trans)national order of martial arts cinema, and the moral and physical economy of vengeance. This course surveys Japan's vibrant media mix cultures spanning the histories of anime, cinema and gaming through the intersections of film and media studies. Charting the emergence of media mix cultures and 'new' media technologies from silent film to augmented reality in Japan, this course introduces students to major works of anime (animated feature films, television series, and other formats), cinema, and video games. We will examine the changing contours of work and play, sentiment and sensation, thought and materiality, and the forms of mediation and social relation that defined Japan's modern media mix ecologies and platforms. This seminar teaches the research and writing skills needed to produce a thesis as an East Asian studies major. Through mini-projects and guest lectures, the class introduces the various disciplines and methodologies used to study East Asia, including history, anthropology, political science, history, literature, and media studies. In addition, the class teaches techniques of research and writing: how to formulate a research question, find and use appropriate sources, write a research proposal, craft a compelling introduction and convincing conclusion.

This course examines postwar Japanese experience through major literary, cinematic, and intellectual achievements. The objective is first to analyze a multitude of struggles in the aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, and then to inquire into the nature of post-industrial prosperity in capitalist consumerism and the emergence of postmodernism.

East Asian History Journal

The course will cover representative postwar figures such as, Oe Kenzaburo, Dazai Osamu, Mishima Yukio, as well as contemporary writers such as Murakami Haruki. Topics include the rise of democratic ideas, unsolved issues of war memories, and the tension between serious and 'popular' fiction writing. North Korea is the subject of an array of often contradictory political and aesthetic representations, each of which make claims to truth. This course sets out to scrutinize these very real and productive imaginaries. Primary engagements will include official speeches and documents, artistic productions and defector testimonies from North Korea, as well as historical research, policy analysis, journalism, and non-state activities from outside the nation's borders. The task of understanding this most troubled of states will be challenged by visits from journalists, former intelligence or policy consultants, defectors, and religious groups.

This course introduces texts of different genres carved into stones in China from the Han to the Qing dynasty. Compared to printed texts and manuscripts, stone inscriptions are a group of sources that remain underutilized and are often read only in transcriptions.

Combining close reading of the texts with perspectives from art history and archaeology, this course places these texts back onto the stones and in the social and cultural contexts of their production. The exploration of these inscriptions will help students open up possibilities of their research in various disciplines from history and literature to religion and art history. Chinese 301 provides basic training for students in classical Chinese and introduces students to theme-based readings about important cultural aspects of pre-modern China, such as the concept of Dao, life and death, Confucian ethics, etc. Each theme consists of passages selected from Chinese classics and short essays or stories full of wisdom and wit from later dynasties. This course will not only improve your four skills in Chinese language (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) but also enhances your general understanding of traditional Chinese philosophy and culture. This course examines the comic book as an expressive medium in Japan.

Reading a range of works, classic and contemporary, in a variety of genres, we consider: How has the particular history of Japan shaped cartooning as an art form there? What critical approaches can help us think productively about comics (and other popular culture)? How can we translate the effects of a visual medium into written scholarly language? What do changes in media technology, literacy, and distribution mean for comics today? Coursework will combine readings, written analysis, and technical exercises. All readings in English.

No fine arts experience required. How does a two-thousand-year-old story transform into a video game? Why do Chinese women continue to write fan-fiction about a story that is so outdated and masculine? This class investigates a tale of ancient China, The Three Kingdoms, tracing its changes through time, across nations, and different media. The story began as history in the 3rd century, but was soon adapted to a variety of media: poetry, opera, novel, film, TV-series, popular songs, and video-games.

By investigating different incarnations of the Three Kingdoms legend, this class explores the ways in which the ancient story was adapted, remaining popular until today. An introduction to some of the most important texts, writers, and topics of Classical Literature from antiquity through the Song dynasty. All readings are in English, and no previous background in Chinese or Asian culture is required. Topics include: nature of the Chinese language; the beginnings of poetry; development of narrative and historical writing; classical Chinese poetics; literature of protest, dissent, and political satire; love poetry; religious and philosophical ideas in Chinese literature.

This course is an introduction to contemporary Chinese cinemas in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. From postwar musicals and pan-Asian blockbusters, to new wave avant-garde films and experimental documentaries, the diversity of Chinese cinemas reflects cinema's relations to global capitalism, Asia's democratization movements, financial crises, and the arrival of (post)socialism. Creating urban nomads, songstresses, daydreamers, travelers, and terrorists, Chinese cinemas put on full display the forces of globalization in shaping the aesthetics and politics of film. Selections broadly include popular commercial films to rare art house productions.

The seminar will examine key concepts of the mind, the body, and the nature-culture distinction. We will study these issues in the context of Japanese beliefs about the good society, making connections between 'lay culture,' Japanese notions of social democracy, and 'science culture.' Topics include: diagnosis and care of the mentally ill, the politics of disability, notions of human life and death, responses to bio-technology, the management of human materials such as organs, cultural definitions of addiction and co-dependency, and the ethics of human enhancement. This course examines 'dangerous bodies' - bodies that transgress existing gender and racial norms in Chinese and Sinophone cultures. Situated at the intersection of literary, film, performance, gender and ethnic studies, this course provides an introduction to the shifting social meanings of the body in relation to historical masculinity, femininity, and Chineseness. We examine different cross-dressed figures, ranging from Mulan, cross-dressed male opera singer, WWII Japanese/Chinese spy, to experimental queer cinema, in a study that unpacks whether these transgressive bodies represent social change or a tool for restoring traditional norms. 2018 buick terraza repair manual.

Knowledge about the world transformed over history: civilization, empire, East-West encounter, and postcolonial homelessness are frames that link identity and space. Reading travelogues by Koreans and about Korea, we will pursue two goals. We will analyze the epistemic coordinates of travelogue that produces knowledge about self and other. And we will note the changing historical contexts around Korea, which defined the modes of mobility for shipwreck survivors, prisoners of war, Christian missionaries, Japanese colonial officials, and communist guerilla fighters. Korea will provide us with a concrete vantage point upon the larger world. The seminar explores conversion in media discourses and practices of the Cold War, with a focus on Asia. Conversion is approached as a protean figure spanning religious doctrine, forces of economic mobility, cross-cultural encounters, and states of political subjectivity.

Its media forms include portrayals of brainwashing, control of networks and content, and ideas about media's hypnotic power. The seminar inquires into how conversion attained heightened conceptual force during the Cold War and will examine quasi-scientific notions of brainwashing, the proliferation of religious cults, and the hardening of ideological binarism. This course will introduce you to important works in modern Chinese literature from late 19th century to the present, which have served as tools of propaganda, national defense, cultural revolution, self-fashioning, gender-conscious communication, or complete depoliticization. Therefore, the multiple literary genres of novel, folklore tale, theater and poetry will be analyzed against related forms of film, opera, music-drama and painting. Our reading of the texts will be set in the context of the turbulent twentieth century, through which you will also gain a comprehensive understanding of the critical moments in modern Chinese history.

This course examines the practices of collecting and anthologizing literary texts in a wide variety of forms during the Tang and Song dynasties. We begin by looking at a range of pre-Tang models for collecting literary material in different forms and consider their different approaches to compilation, including selection criteria, and organization, and then examine the impact of their choices on canonization and transmission.

We study collection practices in state-sponsored anthologies; in primers and literary composition guides in individual literary collections; and finally in large collectanea. This course introduces manuscripts of medieval China preserved in different forms from caves in Dunhuang and tombs in South China to calligraphic works and manuscripts found on the back sides of printed texts. It helps students to independently approach medieval manuscripts by introducing knowledge about the paper, formal and cursive writing, non-standard characters, and methods of punctuation on medieval manuscripts.

It also introduces types of texts found only in manuscript forms, and offers ways of thinking about the culture of writing and reading in medieval China. This course examines the vivid perspectives of Japanese documentary media from 1945 to present as the focal point of our consideration of the geopolitics of image media. We will explore major documentary works that critically engage issues of cultural identity, environmental devastation, regional community, and historical memory to raise questions about the changing prospects and politics of image media. Our shifting focal points will capture key transformations in the archipelago's urban and media environments from the dynamic views of Japan's most influential writers, critics, and media practitioners.