This course highlights developments in Japanese art over the past half century emphasizing topics such as the avant-garde, women artists, environmental art, craft traditions, and museum exhibitions. Art works in media including manga, sculpture, architecture, printmaking, and installation art are examined as windows into war memory, the emperor system, pollution, urbanization, and other historical phenomena.
Days: MO WE  03:30-04:50 PM

In this course, we will explore a range of research methodologies in Asian American Studies and, more broadly, in Ethnic Studies. The readings are organized around questions, approaches, and critiques that will help students develop qualitative research skills, while also considering the politics of research and representation. Students are required to complete daily short written assignments, a research project, and in-class presentations. Peer-writing exchange workshops will be a key component of our learning.
Days: TU  11:00-01:50 PM

This upper-division undergraduate course takes the city as a starting point to understand larger social and political developments in the United States. Processes of segregation and exclusion have placed nonwhite people on the periphery of social, cultural and geographical power in the nation. Histories of racialization tell us that power has always been contested, negotiated, and shaped by people and institutions in historical context—specific times and places.
Days: MO  12:00-02:50 PM

This course examines how the Black freedom struggle has challenged racial, economic, and political inequalities in U.S. history, with a specific focus on the role that Black collective action and social movements have played in advancing social change. We will look at abolitionism in the 1800s, Black internationalism during the long arc of the twentieth century, the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Some questions we will address: How is the U.S. racial order structured? How has the Black freedom struggle challenged this order? How has the Black freedom struggle changed across historical eras? What disagreements and conflicts characterized this struggle in different periods? What types of opposition have Black activists face? How have the state and economic elites and the media responded to them? What mechanisms of repression—physical, legal, ideological—have been deployed against them? To what effect? What is the genealogical relationship of Black Lives Matter to earlier Black activism? What can these stories tell us about race, power, and inequality in the United States?
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

This course examines the moral, legal, and practical status of nonhuman animals in the contemporary U.S.  Topics to be covered include: theoretical debates about the moral status of animals; current knowledge about animal minds and emotions; modern industrial farming; the use of animals for scientific experimentation and human entertainment; the ethics of vegetarianism and veganism; divergent ideologies, strategies, and tactics within the animal liberation/welfare movement; the role of capitalism in furthering animal exploitation; the relationship between animals and ecological crisis; and the nexus of racism and speciesism.
Days: TU TH  05:00-06:20 PM

This course is an introduction to Japanese sociolinguistics, which is the study of the relationship between a language and society. We will explore variety of language uses in modern Japanese and how such variation is constructed by identity and culture. An exploration of attitudes and ideologies about these varieties will be of importance to understanding this relationship. Its main goal is to provide students a systematic introduction to the nature and characteristics of the language use. The course covers:

• Language assimilation and unification of a nation
• Speaking a dialect as manifestation of identity
• Inside and outside of a social group
• Honorific system as the art of socializing in the society
• Use of male/female language based on social norms

(same as 65475 LSCI 169, Lec B)

Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

What happens when plants do not stay silent? Are humans more like plants than we care to admit? With these questions in mind, this colloquium pairs theoretical readings from the field of Critical Plant Studies with novels, short stories, poetry, and films from Japan, China, and South Korea in which plants likes trees and moss are prominently featured. Through seminar-style discussion and student presentations, we will consider various depictions of plants, including plants as spiritual beings and at times as horrific monsters. How can cultural media from East Asia, including modern literary and cinematic works of drama, horror, and sci-fi teach us to see the botanical world in a new way?

Days: MO  02:00-04:50 PM

This course covers the most important themes in the history of Armenians and Armenia in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and does so within a regional (i.e., Middle East and Caucasus) and global context. This course will have a strong thematic approach as we proceed from imperial rule in the nineteenth century through twentieth-century genocide, brief independence, sovietization, and independence again, culminating in the Velvet Revolution, and most recently the war over Artsakh/Karabakh. As we explore this history, we will focus on Armenians as imperial and national subjects in ancestral lands as well as transimperial and transnational subjects in a diaspora that has had a complex relationship with the idea and reality of homeland.
Days: MO WE  09:30-10:50 AM

Emphasis/Category: Locating Europes and European Colonies, Locating Asias (Nation, Culture, and Diaspora)
This upper division course looks at Germany’s storied engagements with China, Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea since the founding of the German Empire in 1871 through to Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative at the onset of the twenty-first century. We will explore Germany’s colonial settlement in China and its role in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion, the influence of German culture, broadly understood, during the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the economic ties with South Korea during the Cold War and East and West Germany’s varied approaches to Vietnamese immigration. Through a study of historical documents as well as cultural artifacts Beyond Europe and Beyond Trade traces the evolution of Germany’s economic, territorial, political, and cultural ambitions in Asia from the late nineteenth-century to the global present and asks how and why Germany’s ties with Asia have evolved from colonial settler policies to soft power economics and cultural exchange in the present time. We will conclude the course by looking at the reversal of power dynamics between Germany and Asia and the impact of global Asia’s economic might in Germany and in the European Union more broadly.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM