This December the Department will be celebrating our 50th Anniversary with a banquet to be held at the Renissance Hotel downtown, join us for a night of more...
Each year the department offers a variety of topics under the course numbed 360B. This year we are offering courses in Modern Japanese Literature, Cultures of Manga and Anime More...
Graduate
South Asia
- ASIA 547 (023) Narrative Theory and South Asian Literature [3.0 credits], Instructor: Dr. Adheesh Sathaye
Not offered in 2011/2012
Course description
Key theoretical issues in the production and enactment of folk narratives in traditional and modern South Asian cultures.
- ASIA 576B (025) - Topics in Sikh and South Asian Studies [3.0 credits], Instructor: Dr. Anne Murphy
Not offered in 2011/2012
General Course Description
This course is designed to explore current scholarly debates in South Asian and Sikh Studies. Topics will vary from year to year; as a result, the course may be repeated for credit with permission of instructor.
Course Description
It has been observed by a number of scholars of the Sikhs that the Sikh political imagination has been configured consistently in relation to the past. In this, the Sikhs are not unusual; political discourse in South Asia today (and in the recent past) often refers to the past in order to justify political positions and even violence in the present. This course is designed to enable students to examine critically the multiple locations of authority in religious and secular contexts in medieval and early modern South Asia (primarily the region that now comprises the modern nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka), with attention to current debates about the role of religious ideology and subjectivities in the formation of communities (both religious and not) and individuals. The topical focus of the class will be on the writing of history, and how the writing of history in different contexts has served to identify and bolster claims to different kinds of authority, both temporal and supra-temporal, in the medieval and early modern periods in South Asia. We take the case of the Sikhs as exemplary, but do so within a larger context of South Asian intellectual and cultural production in the pre-modern period. The engagement with multiple traditions will then also inform our understanding of Sikh tradition itself, in providing insight into the multiple forces that influenced the historical development of Sikh orientations to the past. We pass, therefore, from theoretical and general to specific, in relation to the Sikhs and other cultural formations in South Asia, in order to bring these into productive conversation.
The class will be historical in approach and content but interdisciplinary, exploring aspects of religious life; literary, visual, and cultural production; the formation of imperial and regional polities; and (in particular) intellectual history.