This course examines how writers and filmmakers from the twentieth century to the present have constructed, contested, and reimagined “Asia” as both geography and idea. It explores how cultural production reflects and resists the intertwined histories of empire, modernity, and globalization, tracing how “Asia” has shifted from being an object of vision to a subject of imagination.

Foregrounding postcolonial and decolonial frameworks, we engage with thinkers such as Laura Mulvey, Rey Chow, Arjun Appadurai, Laura Marks, and Benedict Anderson to consider how representation, affect, and imagination operate across borders. Through comparative readings of literature and film, students will examine how Orientalist discourses persist in global media, and how modern and contemporary Asian creators reclaim narrative, gender, and sensory experience as sites of resistance and rewriting. By juxtaposing early representations with modern Asian literary texts and transnational films, this course asks: What does it mean for Asia to imagine itself?

While the course focuses on East, Southeast, and South Asia, it acknowledges its own partiality. These absences are intentional points of inquiry where students are invited to question what and who remains unseen, and to imagine other Asias (Central, West, diasporic, and speculative) beyond the syllabus.

• Representing “Asia” through imagination, ideology, and affect
• Postcolonial and decolonial methods of reading and viewing
• Orientalism and its afterlives: from empire to global capital
• Diaspora, migration, and the politics of belonging
• Gender, sexuality, and the body in postcolonial modernities
• Transnational media flows and the aesthetics of globalization
• Hybridity, opacity, and relational identity
• Sensuous and embodied spectatorship
• Imagined communities and global “-scapes”
• Reclaiming the gaze: from Orientalist fantasy to decolonial re-vision

 

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Develop a nuanced understanding of “Asia” as both a historical construct and a living, contested identity.
• Critically analyze representations of Asia and Asians through postcolonial and decolonial theoretical frameworks.
• Identify different forms of Orientalism and examine how they are appropriated, resisted, or transformed in modern and contemporary texts.
• Demonstrate critical and historical awareness of Asia’s colonial and transnational contexts.
• Apply intersecting discourses on race, gender, sexuality, and class to readings of Asian and diasporic texts.
• Evaluate how contemporary writers and filmmakers challenge, subvert, and reinvent inherited tropes of “the East.”

• There will be two contact hours per week consisting of a mix of group and class discussions, mini-lectures and film screenings, student-led presentations, Socratic circles, and other discussion-based and critical thinking activities. Active participation and consistent preparation are essential for success in this course.
• Students are expected to read up to 100 pages per week. For film weeks, links will be provided if the films are available online; otherwise, selected scenes will be screened in class, or a separate screening session will be organized. Each film will be accompanied by a short critical or theoretical reading to frame discussion.

Attendance is mandatory: if you miss more than 3 classes you may run the risk of a failing grade for participation.

1. Class Participation (20%)

This component includes attendance, and active contributions to class and group discussions. Students are expected to engage critically with weekly readings, screenings, and theoretical concepts, and to demonstrate thoughtful preparation for seminar activities.

2. Student Presentations (25%)

Small groups (3–4 students) will deliver a 15-minute presentation offering a close analysis of one selected film or literary text from the course. Students will sign up for a presentation week based on their chosen work and will present once during the semester. Presentations should demonstrate close reading, showing how aesthetic form, through language, image, sound, or narrative, articulates ideas about Asia, identity, and transnational exchange.

Each group will also design a 10-minute in-class activity to engage their peers. This may take the form of a discussion prompt, comparative exercise, or creative response (e.g. reimagining a voice silenced in the text). The goal is to foster dialogue and experimentation in thinking about how “Asia” imagined.

3. Midterm Essay (25%)

Students will submit a 1000-word comparative analysis focusing on one literary passage and one film scene of their choice. The essay should perform close readings that engage directly with postcolonial and/or decolonial theory discussed in class.

4. Final Essay (30%)

Students will submit a 2000-word essay that develops a sustained comparative argument on how two works (literary, cinematic, or interdisciplinary) engage with the project of imagining “Asia.” The essay should draw upon relevant postcolonial and decolonial theories to examine how cultural forms articulate or unsettle the legacies of empire, globalization, and modernity.

*The chosen film and literary text must differ from those discussed in the group presentation.

Primary Texts (excerpts and selected readings)

• Eileen Chang, “Love in a Fallen City” (1943)
• Saadat Hasan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh” (1955)
• Han Suyin, And the Rain My Drink (1956)
• Shirley Geok-lin Lim , “Journey” (1985)
• Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen (1988)

Filmic Texts (selected screenings)

• Broken Blossoms (Dir. D.W. Griffith, 1919)
• The Kingdom and the Beauty (Dir. Li Han-Hsiang, 1959)
• The Wedding Banquet (Dir. Ang Lee, 1993)
• Happy Together (Dir. Wong Kar Wai, 1997)
• Moving House (Dir. Tan Pin Pin, 2001)

Secondary Texts (Selected excerpts and readings):

• Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975)
• Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983)
• Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes” (1984)
• Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, Modernity at Large (1996)
• Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000)
• Rey Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films (2007)
• Gregg Smith, “How do we identify with characters” (2010)

*Required texts and additional readings will be available on Moodle. Syllabus may be subjected to change.