ASIAN 6629 - Contemporary Studies of Japan

Fall. 4 credits.

N. Sakai.

The class is conducted in the Japanese language but the reading assignments are mostly in English. This course is offered to help graduate students meet the new demands of contemporary East Asian studies. These demands are summarized under three headings: (1) a shift in what is expected of scholarship on East Asia, (2) the intellectual and cultural situation surrounding Asian Studies, and (3) the change in the disciplines in their modus operandi in the Humanities. Here, what is meant by the ‘contemporaneity’ of knowledge production in East Asia does not simply imply the synchrony of research undertaken by students in area studies and the objects of their inquiry, of studying things that are happening at the same time in societies in East Asia today; rather it indicates the simultaneity of their engagement and knowledge production in East Asia. In other words, contemporaneity means the dialogic mode of inquiry in which students do not investigate or speak on the exotic objects of their inquiry but address to and speak with the intellectuals /scholars working and studying in East Asia as interlocutors. In this course, therefore, the emphasis is not on students’ capacity to read and decipher local texts and phenomena, but on their ability to express themselves and engage in interlocutors’ debates. While reading texts particularly influential in the early and contemporary formation of the field and its critique, we will consider such questions as the following: what is academically and intellectually shared between American and East Asian intellectuals in Humanities fields, how can area studies specialists can engage in trans-national problematics and what is the relationship between “East Asia” as an object of area studies discourse and “America” as represented in East Asian journalisms, popular cultures, and politics? Instead of area-related topics, students will be encouraged to discuss their own theoretical concerns in the Japanese language, to discuss with local addressees the historical origins of North American and West European area studies and various critiques conducted on area studies as a model of academic discipline. (SC)