Given the contemporary climate of identity politics, how should we grasp the relation between difference and capital? Rather than considering difference as a social positivity and a given identity that is divorced from the logic of capital, this course approaches difference as it is (re)produced within capital's logic and the historical and materialist development of capitalism itself. In Part 1, we review the logic of capital through the theoretical lens of Marx's Capital, Volume One (1867), paying particular attention to the basic 'doctrines' of circulation, production, and distribution of capital. In Part 2, we investigate diverse methods and techniques by which capitalist development historically (re)produces difference in terms of the division of the world; uneven and combined development; nation, race, and gender; and civilizational difference. By clarifying how difference is (re)produced historically by capitalist development, this course seeks to debunk how difference-as-identity is naturalized in ideology. The course is also intended to give students the increasingly rare opportunity to practice narrating the logic of capital according to Marx.

Adaptations are interesting sites where transcultural dynamics unfold through character portrayal, story arcs, and space-time settings in many films throughout the history of Hong Kong cinema. This course introduces students to the rich variety of literary genres upon which Hong Kong's film adaptations are based and the ways in which Hong Kong literary works are also inspired by various films. With a selection of source texts and film adaptations from Hong Kong screens since the early twentieth century, the course aspires to deepen students' understanding of the interaction between literature and film where the issue of cultural identity has been negotiated in the evolving social and historical context in Hong Kong.

The focus ranges from the examination of cross-cultural theoretical problems (such as Orientalism) to a director-based focus, from the examination of genre (such as documentary or the category of genre itself) to the way film intersects with other cultural forms and technologies (such as video and new media).

This seminar provides an opportunity for in-depth reading and research into a specific topic in the cultural and intellectual history of Korea. Topics will vary each semester but may include colonial period print culture, the New Woman, the history of photography, and modernism.

This course explores Rethinking Realism in 20th Century Korea.

Focusing on the literature of the late colonial period through the late 1950s, this intensive reading seminar will explore ways of configuring modernism mid-century on the Korean peninsula. Topics covered will include: decolonization as a literary event, postcolonial memory, fascist aesthetics, Cold War regimes of style and the gender of writing. Reading knowledge of Korean required.

In this year’s seminar, "Crisis, Population, Archive," we look at three inter-related problems: 1) the theory of historical repetition (Marx, Deleuze, Karatani); 2) Uno Kozo's Theory of Crisis, the theory of capitalist cycles, and the theory of stages of capitalist development; and 3) the question of the historical archive and historical writing. Developing Marxist traditions and straddling disciplines in both the social sciences and the humanities, we return to past investigations of a series of critical and theoretically productive concepts for the practice of "writing history": repetition and contingency; crisis and cycles; class and surplus populations; and state power and stages of capitalist development. The goal of this conceptual itinerary is to develop a method to approach the historical archive, and ultimately to transform existing archives, which, under the monopolization and despotism of the state, tend towards positivism ("facts") and quantitative abstractions ("statistics"). In transforming existing archives, we instead produce, document, and write what Lenin called "the concrete analysis of the concrete situation", or 現状分析. The analysis of the "concreteness" of the "situation," however, requires that we carefully analyze questions of materialism, ideology, the historical present, and the treacherous and dis-Orient-ing ideologies of capitalist, imperialist, and colonial modes of representation.

This course studies Bildungsroman, the story of an individual's coming of age, in the context of twentieth-century political, cultural, and social developments of imperialism, anti-colonialism, human rights discourse, and globalization. Our focus will be novels from the (post)colonial world and theoretical essays on the Bildungsroman form. The course aims to provide a model for rethinking literary history and genres within a global context. Authors may include Yi Kwangsu, Wu Zhouliu, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Kang Younghill, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Camara Laye, amongst others.

This course examines the ways that exteriority (rather than interiority), specifically urban space, informs and is registered in literary texts in relation to the perceiving subject's body in its entirety, including and yet not reduced to the eye. The body is considered not to be opposed to the mind, but to be coordinated with the mind. Inspired by theories of senses (sound, smell, taste, touch, as well as sight), spatial practices (e.g., walking, riding vehicles), and non-literary art forms (e.g., photography, film, architecture, and urban planning), we will reconsider how literary texts we read and write are neither autonomous nor static but are exposed to and interact with the world of multi-sensoriality and the multi-media. The city's mode of operation, the itinerant and kinetic movement of the body, and the traffic of the gaze, gesture, and other sensual relations between bodies and between bodies and things in the city have a crucial impact on the ways that texts are formed. In turn, literary discourse informs those who experience their environs of ways to read, make sense of, and grapple with urban space. We will discuss how the city, the body, and the text help to form and transform each other, in spatially and corporeally conscious stories, travelogues, and novels (in excerpts) of the late nineteenth to early twenty-first century Japanese literature. The city is not just a setting for stories. The body is not subordinate to the mind. And the text is not just a medium of representation. These three cannot be thought of autonomously of one another in the age of literature after the spatial turn and geography after the narrative turn.

This course provides a basic methodological framework for conducting historical research in the social sciences and humanities based on Marx's Capital. In our reading of Capital, we focus on how Marx theorized the "organic" components of capitalism, i.e., Labour Power and Land, and develop these concepts further through the problem of "othering."

The line of inquiry of this seminar returns to the notion of the "communist hypothesis" from an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspective. From this double-perspective, we reconsider the Idea of communism in relation to questions of transition, political organization, and revolution. The course begins with readings in contemporary debates on Communism, the Party, "critical theory," and revisits Marx and Engels' Communist Manfesto. In the second part, we investigate the notion of transition through a Marxist theory of capitalist crisis and a theory of stages of capitalist development. Here, we focus on the works of Marx, Lenin, and Uno Kozo. Finally, we explore questions of communism in the context of "modern" Asia and address specific problems of transition, imperialism, "militarism," and fascism.

This seminar explores the growing field of sound studies with particular attention given to auditory histories and cultures in modern Japan and the prewar Japanese empire in East Asia. We study the interrelationships between industrialization, mass culture, colonialism, and techniques and processes of reproducing sound in order to specify the status of acoustic and sonic mediation in everyday life in a capitalist commodity economy.

How do we build something for the future? Whose future? What future? What is the future? And who is this "we" that will build something for this future that is so slippery to know? While we're at it: to build? Must all buildings be built for them to be buildings? What about dreams? Political movements? Personal relationships? Are they buildings too? And what about the unbuilt and the not-built? The act of unbuilding and not-building? In this seminar we will explore these creeping questions and examine how the future is imagined and materialized in architectural theory and practice throughout Japanese history. From the Ise Shrine of the seventh century to modernist experiments of the Metabolist movement, from contemporary works by Isozaki Arata, Atelier Bow Wow, and Kuma Kengo's new Olympic Stadium to our own crazy experiments, we will study built, unbuilt, and non-built structures as theories of the future…and significant acts of the present.

This course explores the historical and systematic aspects of classical Confucianism, which is fundamental for understanding Chinese philosophy and culture. The historical part discusses the development of the Confucian doctrine from Confucius to his generations of disciples. The systematic part engages issues such as emotion, art, poetry, morality and virtues, political philosophy, and knowledge and reality.

This seminar explores the key literary, doctrinal and ritual innovations of the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition as it unfolded in the first few centuries of the Common Era. The semester will begin with a consideration of the origins of the Mahāyāna in early India, and end in medieval Mahāyāna communities of East Asia and Tibet. Along the way we will conduct close readings of several important Mahāyāna works (sūtras, commentaries, ritual manuals) in order to explore key elements in the development of the Great Vehicle as it was transmitted and transformed across Buddhist Asia.

A course designed to guide students toward a research paper on a selected topic of interest on the postwar political economy of South Korea.

This course explores Cold War in the Pacific.

In The Creation of the World or Globalization (2002), Jean Luc Nancy notes the distinction between two seemingly synonymous terms: globalisation (globalization) and mondialisation (world-making). For Nancy, they are opposing concepts/forces: he deems the former a process of world un-making, as globalization entails the violent imposition of uniformity through economic and techno-logics of late capital. This critique of globalization was not yet mainstream in 2002, but has since taken on the semblance of liberal common sense, particularly in light of emerging reactionary populisms from the US to the UK to Japan and beyond. While the pathologies of economic globalization are omnipresent, the resort to hostile localisms culturalizes and thus disguises the actual political and institutional causes of planetary devastation, social disparity, and dispossession. This misrecognition ultimately shores up the logic of capital and its attendant ideological armatures, including nationalism and developmentalist scales of cultural comparison.

An intensive seminar exploring one of Japan's most recognizable figures, the samurai. This course investigates the historical reality of warrior life along with the legends, with focus on the ways in the warrior's world found expression in religion, art, and literature.

This course surveys theories of media/mediation in relation to Asian contexts and histories. The texts we will read together range from seminal, Anglophone writings on Asian cinemas to more recent studies on ecocriticism and the materiality of new media. The rubric of "theories of media/mediation" is deliberately broad, here, to enable us to address theories of subjectivity, power, identity, coloniality, and affect, related to visual media and modes of mediation. The range of topics is intended, then, less to advance a theoretical argument or even formulate the parameters of a field, but to introduce you to thematic clusters of scholarship that will launch you into further research and reading.

This course examines the history of the Chinese book from the earliest forms of the Chinese "page" to modern print editions. We will begin with the formation of the Chinese writing system and the bones, shells, silk, and bamboo on which it was first inscribed in the centuries BCE. We will then trace the rise of specific commodities and technologies associated with medieval manuscript and early print cultures, including paper, the scroll and codex formats, and the woodblock — many of which were associated with Buddhist textual production. We will conclude by surveying scholarship on the social history of the Chinese book and book culture in the early modern and modern periods. Along the way we will explore the different methods and theories used in diverse fields of study, including book history, philology, literacy studies, and archive studies to examine unique chapters in the history of the Chinese book.

A study of Chinese, Japanese or Korean culture, history, and/or literature. Content depends on the instructor. When offered, the course will have a subtitle that describes its content.

As a species, we hear before we see. This seminar acknowledges both the visual primacy as well as phonocentric tendencies of our modern world, ponders the possibility of an "ensoniment" in conjunction with the dominant enlightenment discourse, and strives to extend the capacity that humanities — both as a species and a scholarly field — hear and understand sounds — their materiality, technologies, and philosophies. We ask the following questions: Why and how does sound become an increasingly important object of study for literary, media, cultural studies, as well as critical theory? If Jonathan Sterne is right in diagnosing heretofore an absence of a sufficient working language that describes sound, then what could our engagement with sound and its matters contribute? If Jacques Attali is right in pinpointing music as prophetic for socio-economic and cultural change, then what are the sonic prophecies of our post-revolution, anthropocenic, and post-human age? What can we gain from the philosophical teachings of sounds produced by fellow humans, nonhuman actors, sound reproduction technologies and sonic imagination? Through matched methodological and theoretical readings, we will work to develop our critical vocabulary of sound and proximate a functional sonic semiotics. Through an insistent and supple attention to sound matters and a firm belief that sound does matter, we hope to hear the prophetic messages of the sound of our world and learn to better inhibit this earth.

This seminar explores the oceanic imaginary of space and the spatial technologies of islanding in the modern world — including the emergence of mega-ports, artificial islands, and the creation of political and economic zones of exception and military bases, with an emphasis on East and Southeast Asia. Posing islanding in the verb form, the readings deconstruct “island” as a natural geographic setting and probe its role in mediating the relations between individual and totality, insularity and world, mainland and periphery, land and sea, etc. We explore different mediations of oceanic imaginary and work toward theories of resistance.

This course will be an opportunity to analyze premodern Chinese texts (before 1800) in original and translation, written by women, about women, and in the voices of women, across a variety of genres drawn from literature, history, philosophy, and religion. These texts provide opportunities to explore how gender was constructed in Chinese societies, how women were defined and constrained by texts, and how women used writing to express themselves, often in resistance to dominant modes of representation.

This course explores how reading has been defined, taught, and theorized from a comparative East Asian perspective. Focusing on key moments of transformation from antiquity through the early modern period in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Inner Asia, we will examine the core tools readers have used to make sense of texts. This course will further consider methodological strategies for the study of reading and the history of textual interpretation, drawing on research from other regional contexts.

This course explores the history of Manchu rule in China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912), through an introduction to the Manchu language. In addition to acquiring basic Manchu reading skills, you will be exposed to a wide range of historical approaches to the study of Manchu social, literary, and political culture, as well as ethnicity in late imperial China.

This course explores the history of multiethnic rule in China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912), as well as earlier precedents and legacies in the contemporary world. Students will examine concepts of racial and ethnic identity, empire and colonialism, and translation and cross-cultural exchange through the study of Manchu-Mongol-Tibetan-Uyghur-Chinese interactions during this period.

This course will introduce students to selected topics in Hong Kong literature from the early 20th century to the present through thematic research seminars on its various aspects, such as language, diaspora, life, leftism, Sinophone, etc. Students will read Hong Kong literary texts and their scholarly literature from interdisciplinary perspectives for a basic overview of the historical developments of Hong Kong literature. Upon completion of the course, students will be able to find archival resources for the studies of Hong Kong literature, analyze Hong Kong literary texts from interdisciplinary approaches, and conduct independent research on Hong Kong literature.

This course is designed to help students build communication skills in the Korean language. Through integration of listening, speaking, reading, and writing, this course aims to provide a solid foundation in beginning-level Korean. Emphasis will be placed on using Korean in real-life-like situations/tasks with culturally appropriate and acceptable manners. In the tutorials, students are expected to actively participate in communicative exchanges with the instructor and classmates.