AMES8001: Critical Approaches to Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

This course aims to provide critical and theoretical foundations for incoming graduate students in Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media program, while also addressing broader questions that would be of interest to students in other departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our project will be to generate discussion about the theoretical and political complexities of studying Asia and the Middle East from a cross-cultural and transnational perspective, taking account of several inter-related questions at the heart of the work of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Beginning with Edward Said’s critique of orientalism as our point of departure, we will take up a range of questions revolving around debates over historiography (e.g., capitalism and the formations of race and gender, nationalism and imperialism, etc.) and the relationship between cultural studies and political-economy (e.g., the political unconscious, national allegory, translation and translingual practice, ethnographic gaze, etc.) with a particular attention to the complications posed by taking “Asia” as the object of intellectual inquiry in any such analysis. Our discussions will consider key problematics in cultural theory, the uses of such theory in the Asian context and some of the issues thereby raised, and critical interventions by scholars of Asia.

View on University Catalog