Books for purchase:
Vincente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism
Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo
Ananta Toer Pramoedya, This World of Mankind
George Orwell, Burmese Days
Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover
This course examines encounters between Asian and Western peoples from Marco Polo to the present. Focuses on tensions among economic, cultural, and religious aims of Iberian expansion in the East Indies and the Philippines, rising Dutch competition for these territories, and later English and French imperial expansion into southeast and east Asia. Some themes of the course include problems of orientalism/occidentalism and the myth of the Western "impact" on Asia by learning about how Asian peoples understood the West and also about the ways that Europe, too, was affected by these encounters. Thus we are not concerned about how (or whether) the West influenced Asian countries in these encounters, but rather the nature of these contacts and how peoples of different cultures understood those of others.
Vincente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 7-54
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Knopf, 1993)
Marco Polo, The Travels, 7-112
Marco Polo, The Travels, 113-259
Janet Abu-Lughod, "On the Remaking of History: How to Reinvent the Past" (Remaking History), 111-129
Rhoads Murphey, A History of Asia, 101-110; 163-186
Hugh Clark, "Muslims and Hindus in the Culture and Morphology of Quanzhou from the 10th to the 13th Centuries," Journal of World History 6 (1995) 1: 49-74
Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, 19-85
Timothy Billings, "Visible Cities: The Heterotopic Utopia of China in Early Modern European Writing," Genre 30 (1997): 107-136
Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942
Charles Ralph Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800, 1-30
Charles Ralph Boxer, Portuguese and Dutch Colonial Rivalry, 1641-1661
Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583-1610,
David Mungello, "Ricci’s Formulation of Jesuit Accomodation in China" (Curious Land), 44-73
Otis Cary, A History of Christianity in Japan (Revell, 1909), 13-241
C.R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650, 41-90
Vincente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 84-135
Edward Said, "The Scope of Orientalism" (Orientalism), 4-15, 201-11
Emily Apter, "Harem: Colonial Fiction and Architectural Fantasm in Turn-of-the-Century France," Places Through the Body, 119-132
Art:
Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme: His Life, His Work (Sotheby's Publications, 1986)
Picturing the Middle East: A Hundred Years of European Orientalism
Music:
Karl Vollmoeller, Turandot: Princess of China: A Chinoiserie in Three Acts, 1913
Puccini, "Madama Butterfly" (1904)
Alain-René Lesage and d’Orneval (1688-1747), "La Princesse de Chine" (1729)
Puccini (1858-1924), "Turandot" (1921)
Ann Stoler, "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia" (Becoming National), 286-324
Ann Stoler, "‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives," Representations (Winter 1992), 151-189
Anne McLintock, "The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism" (Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest), 21-74
Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover
Film: "The Lover," dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud (France 1991, 113 mins.)
Film: "M. Butterfly," dir. David Cronenberg (US 1995, 100 mins.)
Michael Banton, "The Classification of Races in Europe and North America, 1700-1850," International Social Science Journal (Feb. 1987), 45-60
Karl Friedrich August Gutzlaff (1803-1851), The Journals of Two Voyages along the Coast of China in 1831 & 1832, 1-124
Andrew Porter, "Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long 19th Century, 1780-1914," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20 (Sept. 1992) 3: 370-90
Johannese Fabian, "Religious and Secular Colonization" (Time and the Work of Anthropology), 155-169
Murray Rubinstein, The Origins of the Anglo-American Missionary Enterprise in China, 1807-1840 (Scarecrow, 1996)
James Hevia, "Leaving a Brand on China, Missionary Discourse in the Wake of the Boxer Movement," Modern China 18 (1992): 304-332
Otis Cary (1851-1932), A History of Christianity in Japan (New York: F. H. Revell, 1909)
Toyohiko Kagawa (1888-1960), Christ and Japan (New York, Friendship Press, 1934)
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth Mankind
Jonathan Spence, The Question of Hu
David Palumbo-Liu, "The Bitter Tea of Frank Capra," positions 3 (1995) 3: 759-789
Film: The Bitter Tea of General Yen, dir. Frank Capra (Columbia Films, 1933)
Timothy Mo, The Monkey King
Maxine Hong Kingston, Chinamen