Global Arc

The seminar introduces the manuscript culture of ancient and medieval China from the 4th century BCE to the advent of printing in around 1000 CE. We discuss the creation, uses, purposes, and the visual and material aspects of writings on bamboo, wood, silk, and paper. Examining texts buried in ancient tombs, left in watchtowers, or stored in desert caves, we look at writings to accompany the dead; personal letters; calligraphic masterpieces; copies of the classics; and carriers of medical, legal, administrative, or mantic knowledge cherished by the cultural and political elite and soldiers and peasants alike. With two museum visits.

This course offers an introduction to writing by and about women in China from the Han dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE) to the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). We will read both literary and historical sources to understand the development of representations of women as subjects in the early period, but the focus of the semester's readings will be on the innovations of women as writers from the Song through the Qing.

The course offers an introduction to moving image cultures in modern Japan with a focus on how technological aesthetic media has transformed the experience and understanding of action. While emphasis is placed on the production and reception of popular action film genres from Japan, the course also explores the relationship of those films to international film cultures in the context of broader historical transformations in media practices and in modes of distribution and reception. We will engage with ethical and political questions concerning issues such as gendered and racialized representations of action and the aesthetics of violence.

This course will survey jidaigeki--Japanese period films--from its prehistory to its return in the 21st century. We will pay attention to the works of geniuses of Japanese period film such as Masahiro Makino and Kurosawa Akira, but we will also study film in relation to broader political, economic, social and cultural contexts. In particular, we will consider various ways in which filmmakers, critics, and cultural policy makers of different backgrounds and ideological orientations have turned to jidaigeki in order to interrogate their historical present.

This class introduces students to the tradition of monstrous imagination in Japanese history, from the earlier texts of the 8th century to the most recent films. Students will be exposed to a vast array of sources depicting different monstrous creatures. Monsters will function as the meaning-making devises through which students will understand different aspects of Japanese culture through twelve centuries of its history. Far from being simply figures of imaginations, the vast coterie of monstrous creatures and phenomena ¿interacted¿ in very concrete ways with people, influencing their political, economic, and social life.

This course examines the uses of poetry in Chinese films and media products from the early twentieth century to the present. We will focus on how poetry and cinema work with each other to expand imaginations of the Chinese-speaking world. How do filmmakers juxtapose traditional Chinese verses with modern settings? How does poetry in other languages cast an unexpected light on Chinese homes, villages, rivers and mountains, and outer space? How might cinema illumine hidden aspects of Chinese cities by capturing underground poetry scenes? The course ends by considering the impact of current fast media consumption on how we enjoy films and poems.

This course explores the interplay between genre and gender in 20th and 21st century Japanese cinema. This task entails, as described by Christine Gledhill, reconfiguring their relationship "not in terms of social reflection, ideological misrepresentation, or subject positioning but as cinematic affect and discursive circulation between society and story, public and imaginary worlds." We will study how various film genres translate gender discourses and ideologies into aesthetic experiences, and how gender's aesthetic and imaginative power brings genres to life as dynamic processes of cultural production and social transformation.

This course explores feminist pedagogies and praxis across East Asia, focusing on historical practices of political and social activism, collective action, community work, and healing, care and self-discovery. It investigates how these practices, whether explicitly framed as feminist and/or pedagogical, have constituted powerful forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power, particularly those of masculinity and hetero-patriarchy. By studying historical contingent and concretized forms of pedagogy, we aim to gain a greater understanding of feminist pedagogies as complex, embodied and social processes of knowledge-making.

This course convenes experiences of watching and thinking about contemporary Asian American film. The syllabus is built around narrative films made by and about ethnicized Asians that have crossed the threshold of commercial viability or popular visibility in America. The central critical theme: how can the structure, flow, and mood of film, diminished in cultural capital but still vital as a form of imaginative storytelling, inspire incisive modes of seeing, feeling, and thinking what it means to be Asian in the world today? Core methods of film analysis and surveys of Asian American history inform the meditations on that central theme.

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year.