This course will examine various literary, historical, and political responses to the Cambodian genocide, particularly literary testimony by survivors and governmental efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. The course considers the limited effectiveness of these responses for addressing the causes and effects of genocide despite the vow of "never again." To pursue these questions, students will read selections from novels and poetry written by Cambodian survivors, along with historical accounts of the genocide and analysis attempts by the Cambodian government and the international community to bring the perpetrators to justice. (SC)

Full details for ASIAN 2225 - Literature, Politics, and Genocide in Cambodia

Can we identify a distinctive Asian food and food culture? Challenging attempts to define heterogenous gastronomic practices as authentic reflections of a static Asian identity, this course discusses how food, diet, and cuisine have been integral to shaping boundaries of culture, identity, and nation across geographical and temporal divisions in Asia. We will examine how people use daily and visceral food experiences to imagine themselves as members of a given community, be it a nation, ethnicity, class, gender, or religion, while also examining how food practices constantly challenge that fixation and redraw these categories. Through examining a wide range of materials in diverse disciplines, ranging from reading historical and anthropological studies to watching “food porn” and TV cooking shows, we will discuss topics related to cookery and the media, colonialism and culinary modernity, food production and consumption, gender and cooking, food and (trans)nationalism, diaspora and globalization of food as well as eating and inequality. (SC)

Full details for ASIAN 2272 - Food and Asia

China is often thought of as being isolated from the outside world. It is imagined as existing in historic seclusion, and, following the establishment of the People's Republic, as pursuing a path of autarky. Such separation has then only been somewhat modified by the set of economic reforms that Deng Xiaoping first instituted in the late 1970s. In this lecture we will seek to turn such conventional wisdom on its head through examining what China is via a consideration of transnational currents within the country's development. However, the course's primary focus will not be upon the past, but rather the present and attempting to determine just where the point of intersection between China and the rest of the world is. Coming to terms with such an issue will provide those who enroll in the class with a deeper, more nuanced, understanding of China's rise and this trend's implications for the rest of the world. We will accomplish this task through a combination of surveying the existing literature on China and transnational politics, and considering new theoretical perspectives on both. (SC)

Full details for ASIAN 3395 - What is China?