I seem to have forgotten to blog about syllabus ideas for the current semester, so I am going to do something unprecedented to make up for it, which is to blog about syllabus ideas for next semester now, before I even order books for Fall. (It’s a topsy-turvy world, I tell you.)<\/p>\n
If you are interested, all the syllabai for this semester are here<\/a>.<\/p>\n For Fall 2016 I have pretty much the same line-up<\/p>\n The new class for Fall is HIST 437 <\/b>History of Modern Japan<\/b> (Meiji to present) This is the first time I am doing it this way. I have split Japan in half, since I was getting tired of spending the whole first part of a 1600 to present Japan class talking about social and economic history and then the whole second half putting politics in command.<\/p>\n For a textbook I am going to use<\/p>\n Goto-Jones, Christopher. Modern Japan: A Very Short Introduction<\/i>. OUP, 2009.<\/p>\n I like these Short Introductions, and given how hard it is to get students to read a textbook, shorter is better.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n Nagatsuka, Takashi, and Ann Waswo. The Soil: A Portrait of Rural Life in Meiji Japan<\/i>. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989.<\/p>\n Need a primary source for an upper-level class, and this one works well for rural life, family, etc.<\/p>\n Silverberg, Miriam. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times<\/i>.. University of California Press, 2009.<\/p>\n Given that a lot of the class will be about films and modern culture this seems like a good monograph to use, and of course you need one of those.<\/p>\n Then I was thinking of using a few films, possibly Eijanaika<\/i>, 1981; Stray Dog<\/i>, 1949; and Akira<\/i>, 1988<\/p>\n What else could I put in here? Anything you would substitute for one of these?<\/p>\n HIST 198 The Rise of Modern Asia <\/b>(India to Japan, 1850 to present) will remain pretty much the same, and the books will still be<\/p>\n Amitav Ghosh The Glass Palace: A Novel<\/i>.<\/p>\n I could see replacing this with something else, if I could think of anything else that covers as much time and space in a well-written historical fiction novel as this.<\/p>\n Guha, Ramachandra. ed. Makers of Modern Asia<\/i>.<\/p>\n I think this is working o.k., for the kids who read it. I really like the idea of focusing on biography as a way to bring all the stuff that was happening into focus, although of course that leads to and emphasis on political leaders. Honestly I can’t think of anything else as a substitute.<\/p>\n Asia 200 Introduction to Asian Studies <\/b><\/p>\n This is the one where I try to come up with a set of books and movies that cover most of Asia and various disciplinary traditions. So this semester I used<\/p>\n Shadid, Anthony. Night Draws Near: Iraq\u2019s People in the Shadow of America\u2019s War<\/i>.\u00a0 Picador, 2006.<\/p>\n Worked o.k. I always start with a journalist\/travel book to make things easy<\/p>\n -Errington, Frederick, Deborah Gewertz, and Tatsuro Fujikura. The Noodle Narratives: The Global Rise of an Industrial Food into the Twenty-First Century<\/i>. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.<\/p>\n Not a huge hit, although I am not sure why.<\/p>\n -Chan, Koonchung. The Fat Years<\/i>. Translated by Michael S. Duke. New York: Anchor, 2013.<\/p>\n Worked o.k. Plus it breaks India’s long stranglehold on the novel\/literature category.<\/p>\n -Jerryson, Michael K. Buddhist Fury: Religion and Violence in Southern Thailand<\/i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.<\/p>\n Just starting this now<\/p>\n -Amrith, Sunil S. Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants<\/i>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.<\/p>\n Have not gotten to this yet.<\/p>\n For movies I used Tampopo (1985), although they did not care for it, as it was too weird, and Paradise Now (2005) which they liked a lot.<\/p>\n This class is getting to be more and more difficult to figure out. I could of course repeat a book……I don’t normally do that, but I could. I am sort of stuck in a rut of doing Journalist books on the Middle East (have to have Middle East\/Islam somewhere) because there are so many of them and, frankly, it is the easiest thing for me to teach in that region. I was thinking of pairing up<\/p>\n Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days<\/i>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. The autobiography of a Pakistani woman, so Islam and Literature. I did this before. Students hated with the passion of 10,000 burning suns, until some of them started to like it.<\/p>\n with<\/p>\n Hoesterey, James. Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-Help Guru<\/i>. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. Anthropology and Southeast Asia<\/p>\n Maybe Meyer, Michael. The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed<\/i>. Reprint edition. Walker Books, 2009. for Journalism\/travel writing, and a good Pan-Asian topic of rapid urbanization<\/p>\n Then maybe do something weird, like<\/p>\n Slingerland, Edward. Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity<\/i>. New York: Broadway Books, 2015.<\/p>\n Yes, it’s a self-help book, and it’s based on Zhuangzi, who my students generally dislike, but it’s EDWARD SLINGERLAND. Plus, for the first time I will be able to include \u201cPhilosophy\u201d as one of my disciplinary traditions. Alas, this is two China books.<\/p>\n A few of other possibilities are<\/p>\n Truitt, Allison J. Dreaming of Money in Ho Chi Minh City<\/i>. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.<\/p>\n White, Merry. Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval<\/i>. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.<\/p>\n The problem with these is that while I could cheat and call Truitt Economics and White History they are both really anthropologists. I have no problem thinking of history books, and literature is easy, as is Journalism\/travel. Lots of other disciplines (Sociology., Political Science, Economics) have pretty much abandoned the Area Studies approach, and so while I would like to fit them in, I usually can’t.<\/p>\n So what is your advice? What cool Asia books would you love to teach?<\/p>\n If I am going to have to give short writing assignments, schedule class discussions and give quizzes to get them to read something I would just as soon it not be a textbook. 10 years from now none of them will remember the 200 pages of textbook they read, but they may remember a real book I had them read. ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I seem to have forgotten to blog about syllabus ideas for the current semester, so I am going to do something unprecedented to make up for it, which is to blog about syllabus ideas for next semester now, before I even order books for Fall. (It’s a topsy-turvy world, I tell you.) 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