As our regular readers know, there is a tradition here of posting our syllabai for comments. One class I will be teaching in the Fall is ASIA 200, Introduction to Asian Studies. This is a class that is supposed to introduce our Asian Studies students to the various areas of Asia (we do all of Asia) and the various disciplines that study it. I usually organize it around a few readings and films that have a common theme of sorts. I’m thinking of using “family and community” as the theme.<\/p>\n
One possibility is using Gregory Ruf Cadres and Kin: Making a Socialist Village in West China, 1921-1991 <\/em>It’s Antropology and History, it’s China, its short, it’s readable (I think), and it’s in paperback. It deals with the transformation of a community under the hand of the modernizing state. Now I need a bunch of other stuff from other areas and other disciplines. I was thinking of using at least a couple of films, maybe Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home <\/a>and Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less<\/a>? (Maybe Oshima’s Boy<\/a>?) Something on Southeast Asia, a novel, something more poly-sci like. I can think of lots of China things and a fair number of Japan things, but for South Asia and the Middle East I get a bit more limited.<\/p>\n So my question to you is what books or films or whatever had you really wanted to teach and thought would work well with undergrads? The nice thing about a thematic class like this is that we historians are very rarely released from the tyranny of chronology, so for me this is a chance to do a lot of fun stuff. What should I do with it? I’m pretty flexible at this point as far as theme and areas, I’m mostly looking for really good things to show them\/have them read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As our regular readers know, there is a tradition here of posting our syllabai for comments. One class I will be teaching in the Fall is ASIA 200, Introduction to Asian Studies. This is a class that is supposed to introduce our Asian Studies students to the various areas of Asia (we do all of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,119,163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-english","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-3I","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4976,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions\/4976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}