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Preference to freshmen.This course considers a variety of animal characters in Chinese and Western literatures as potent symbols of cultural values and dynamic sites of ethical reasoning. What does pervasive animal imagery tell us about how we relate to the world and our neighbors? How do animals define the frontiers of humanity and mediate notions of civilization and culture? How do culture, institutions, and political economy shape concepts of human rights and animal welfare? And, above all, what does it mean to be human in the pluralistic and planetary 21st century?

This class introduces key literary texts from Japan's modern era (1868-present), locating these works in the larger political, social, and cultural trends of the period. Primary texts include: Futabatei Shimei's Floating Clouds, Higuchi Ichiyô's Child's Play, Natsume Sôseki's Kokoro, Kobayashi Takiji's Cannery Boat, Ôe Kenzaburô's The Catch, and Yoshimoto Banana's Kitchen. Examination of these literary works will be contextualized within larger political trends (e.g., the modernization program of the Meiji regime, the policies of Japan's wartime government, and postwar Japanese responses to the cold war), social developments (e.g., changing notions of social class, the women's rights movement, and the social effects of the postwar economic expansion), and cultural movements (e.g., literary reform movement of the 1890s, modernism of the 1920s and 30s, and postmodernism of the 1980s). The goal of the class is to use literary texts as a point of entry to understand the grand narrative of Japan's journey from its tentative re-entry into the international community in the 1850s, through the cataclysm of the Pacific War, to the remarkable prosperity of the bubble years in the 1980s.

How literary works outside the realm of Western culture struggle with questions such as identity, minority, and the issue of the Other. How the Arab is viewed in Hebrew literature, film and music and how the Jew is viewed in Palestinian works in Hebrew or Arabic (in translation to English). Historical, political, and sociological forces that have contributed to the shaping of these writers' views.nnGuest lectures about the Jew in Palestinian literature and music.

This course explores the central place Africa holds in prose writing emerging during early and modern periods of globalization across the Atlantic, including the middle passage, exploration and colonialism, black internationalism, decolonization, immigration, and diasporic return. We will begin with Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789), a touchstone for the Atlantic prose tradition, and study how writers crossing the Atlantic have continued to depict Africa in later centuries: to dramatize scenes of departure and arrival in stories of self-making or new citizenship, to evoke histories of racial unity or examine psychic and social fragmentation, to imagine new national communities or question their norms and borders. Our readings will be selected from English, French, Portuguese and Spanish-language traditions. And we will pay close attention to genres of prose fiction (Conrad, Condé, Olinto), epic and prose poetry (Césaire, Walcott), theoretical reflection (Gilroy, Glissant, Mudimbe, Benitez-Rojo), and literary autobiography (Barack Obama, Saidiya Hartman).

This course examines the ways writers in literature and medicine have used the narrative form to explore the ethics of care in what has been called the developing world. We will begin with a call made by the editor-in-chief of The Lancet for a literature of global health, namely fiction modeled on the social reform novels of the nineteenth century, understood to have helped readers develop a conscience for public health as the field emerged as a modern medical specialty. We will then spend the quarter understanding how colonial, postcolonial, and world literatures have answered and complicated this call. Readings will include prose fiction by Albert Camus, Joseph Conrad, Tsitsi Dangaremgba, Amitav Ghosh, Susan Sontag as well as physician memoirs featuring Frantz Fanon, Albert Schweitzer, Abraham Verghese, Paul Farmer. And each literary reading will be paired with medical, philosophical, and policy writings that deeply inform the field of global health.

A broad engagement with Indian cinema: its relationship with Indian politics, history, and economics; its key thematic concerns and forms; and its adaptation of and response to global cinematic themes, genres, and audiences. Locating the films within key critical and theoretical debates and scholarship on Indian and world cinemas. Goal is to open up what is often seen as a dauntingly complex region, especially for those who are interested in but unfamiliar with its histories and cultural forms.

This course explores history via cultural responses in modern India. We will examine a range of fiction, film and drama to consider the ways in which India emerges through its cultural productions. The course will consider key historical events such as the partition of the subcontinent, independence from British rule, Green Revolution, Emergency, liberalization of the Indian economy, among others. We will reflect on epochal historical moments by means of artisticnresponses to these events. For example, Ritwik Ghatak's experimental cinema intervenes into debates around the Bengal partition; Rohinton Mistry's novel, A Fine Balance grapples with the suspension of civil liberties during the emergency between 1975-77; Rahul Varma's play Bhopal reflects on the Bhopal gas tragedy, considered the world's worst industrial disaster. Students willnread, view and reflect on the aesthetic and historical texts through their thoughtful engagement in class discussions and written e ssays. They will also have opportunities to imaginatively respond to these texts via short creative projects, which could range from poems, monologues, solo pieces, web installations, etc. Readings will also include Mahashweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Girish Karnad, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manjula Padmanabhan, Salman Rushdie, Aparna Sen, among others.

Examines the current debates in France regarding national identity, secularism, and the integration of immigrants, notably from the former colonies. Confronts films' and other media's visual and discursive rhetorical strategies used to represent ethnic or religious minorities, discrimination, radicalization, terrorism, inter-racial marriages, or women's rights within immigrant communities. By embodying such themes in stories of love, hardships, or solidarity, the motion pictures make the movements and emotions inherent to immigration tangible: to what effect? Taught in English. Films in French with English subtitles. Additional paper for students enrolled in 332.

(Same as HISTORY 147. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for 147.) Introduction, focusing particularly on the modern era. Topics include: precolonial African societies; European colonization; the impact of the mineral revolution; the evolution of African and Afrikaner nationalism; the rise and fall of the apartheid state; the politics of post-apartheid transformation; and the AIDS crisis.