Asian Studies Culture Courses
01:098:345
- Course Title: Asia-Pacific in Cross-Cultural Perspective
- Semester(s) Offered: Spring
- Credits: 3
Course Description:
01:098:345 Asia-Pacific in Cross-Cultural Perspective
This course explores the social, cultural, and political interactions in the Asia-Pacific region from the late nineteenth century to the present from a cross-cultural perspective. Students will gain “alternative” perspectives and learn to critically examine topics on early U.S.-Asia encounters (immigrants, students, embassies), colonialism, and war and its legacies through exposure to multiple points of view: the “voices” or contemporaneous literary works and primary sources (in translation), museums and sites where the experiences are remembered and told, and faculty and students of a Japanese university. Guest lecturers will be invited for selected topics.
This is an inter-institutional collaborative learning course with Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. We will be joined for four weeks during the semester by students from Ritsumeikan, who will attend our lectures and discussions and work on group projects. There will be a number of optional field trips with the Ritsumeikan students, which include an overnight visit to Washington, DC and a day-trip to Seabrook Farm. The class will culminate with joint online sessions with Prof. Keiji Nakatsuji’s class at Ritsumeikan in April and May.
Note: The optional second segment of this course will be held in the summer at Ritsumeikan. The summer course will feature a three-week study abroad experience at Ritsumeikan, Kyoto, which includes participation in Professor Nakatsuji’s class on contemporary issues in Asia-Pacific Relations (which includes an overnight trip to Hiroshima), followed by a one-week trip to Tokyo led by Prof. Wakabayashi. Students enrolled in the spring semester are encouraged to apply for the summer program (applications are due to Rutgers Study Abroad in March). Students enrolled in this course will be given priority in the application process, provided they maintain adequate academic progress in the spring.
01:098:280
- Course Code: 01:098:280
- Course Title: Modern Vietnam in Literature and Film
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall
- Credits: 3
01:098:280 | Modern Vietnam in Literature and Film
Discovery of the culture, history, traditions, and collective identity of the people of Vietnam, a country at the crossroads of Southeast and East Asia. Analysis of a wide range of approaches by which the Vietnamese, including their diaspora, have come to identify themselves, memorialize their histories, and reproduce their cultures. All course materials are in English, although some films will be in Vietnamese with English subtitles.
01:098:252
- Course Code: 01:098:252
- Course Title: Southeast Asia and the World
- Semester(s) Offered: Spring
- Credits: 3
- SAS Core Certified: HST, SCL
01:098:252/01:508:250 | Southeast Asia and the World – Core requirements: HST, SCL
This course introduces students to Southeast Asia—one of the “crossroads of the world”—and its history from the earliest times until the end of the twentieth century. Southeast Asia is a large and complex region, comprised of 11 independent countries—Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam—and home to animism, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, and Islam as well as some of the greatest ethnic, linguistic, and biocultural diversity anywhere in the world. Yet, it tends to be dwarfed by its powerful neighbors, India and China. In world histories, it has received scant attention, remaining practically invisible until the 19th century when the entire region (with the exception of Siam/Thailand) was brought under European and American colonial rule.
01:098:479 Environmental Crises in Southeast Asia
- Course Code: 01:098:479
- Course Title: Environmental Crises in Southeast Asia
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall
- Credits: 3
01:098:479 | Environmental Crises in Southeast Asia
Course Description:
This course examines the diversity of human relationships with nature and the various perceptions humans have about environmental crisis. Why do we investigate today’s global environmental problems by focusing on the cultures and histories of Southeast Asia? A region of rich biodiversity and complex histories, Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, or the Philippines have all undergone major worldwide processes like colonial (or semi-colonial) extraction, nationalization of resources, and the search for sustainable development. But environmental crisis is limited neither to developmental nor regional issues. Beyond the debates between economic gains and ecological costs are the various local perceptions of social, cultural, and environmental uncertainties.
01:098:473 The Silk Road: A History of Cultural and Material Exchanges
- Course Code: 01:098:473
- Course Title: The Silk Road: A History of Cultural and Material Exchanges
- Semester(s) Offered: Fall, Spring, Summer
- Credits: 3
01:098:473 The Silk Road: A History of Cultural and Material Exchanges
Course description:This course introduces the history of the Silk Road—a complex network of trade routes that connected China with the rest of the Eurasian continent over land and sea—and its role in fostering cultural and material exchanges between the peoples it connected. The course covers the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, during which the Silk Road contributed to the forming and transforming the cultural, ethnic, and religious identities of different peoples, such as Chinese, Greeks, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and Mongolians, and their perceptions of one another. The course, moreover, explores topics, including conspicuous consumption, cultural diversity, religious pluralism, and nomadic migration, as well as the financial, judicial, religious, and social institutions that were the fruits of these exchanges. The course begins and ends with an analysis of conceptualizations of the “Silk Road” against the backdrop of the “Great Game” that played out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among various colonial powers and its legacy to this day. It also examines the recent push by the Chinese government to establish the so-called “Silk Road Economic Belt” by tapping into its rich legacy.