Southeast Asian Studies (SEASIAN)

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022
This course is devoted to a study of selected literary texts set in various regions of Southeast Asia. The readings will include works by foreign authors who lived and traveled in Southeast Asia and translations of works by Southeast Asian writers. These texts will be used to make comparisons and observations with which to characterize coloniality, nationalism, and postcoloniality. This course satisfies the first half of the Reading and Composition requirement.
Self, Representation, and Nation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023
In this course, the student will read selections from the large body of scholarly texts that have been written about Southeast Asia. Expository and argumentative essays by premier scholars such as Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, Margaret Mead, Clifford Geertz, and Benedict Anderson will be examined. Discussions will cover a broad range of theoretical issues including power, gender, and space. This course satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.
Under Western Eyes: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Summer 2021 Second 6 Week Session, Fall 2020
Readings, lectures, and discussion of the culture and civilization of Southeast Asia. Mainland Southeast Asia: Covers the modern-day nations of Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, etc., with special emphasis on the impact of Hinduism and Buddhism. (F,SP) Staff
Introduction to the Civilization of Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2022, Spring 2021
Readings, lectures, and discussion of the culture and civilization of Southeast Asia. Insular Southeast Asia: Covers the modern-day nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Special emphasis on the arts and their social and political context, with discussions on the impact of the colonial experience and the question of modernization vs. tradition.
Introduction to the Civilization of Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023
This course is a survey of the histories, cultures, and religions of mainland Southeast Asia from the period of the early Khmer empire until the 2000s. It surveys the countries of Cambodia, Myanmar/Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. By the end of the course, students are expected to: (a) explain the broad patterns of historical change in mainland Southeast Asia from the 10th century to the present, (b) explain the major cultural shifts and religious formations that have shaped mainland Southeast Asia over the past thousand-plus years, (c) discuss cultural texts that reflect the history of mainland Southeast Asia, and (d) explain mainland Southeast Asia’s shifting relations with the world over the longue durée.
Introduction to the History, Religion, and Culture of Mainland Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
This course is a survey of the histories, cultures, and religions of insular Southeast Asia from the
early modern period until the 2000s. It surveys the countries of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia,
Brunei, East Timor, and Singapore. By the end of the course, students are expected to: (a) explain
the broad patterns of historical change in insular Southeast Asia from the early modern period to the
present, (b) explain the major cultural shifts and religious formations that have shaped insular
Southeast Asia over the period covered, (c) discuss cultural texts that reflect the history of insular
Southeast Asia, and (d) explain insular Southeast Asia’s shifting relations with the world over the
longue durée.
Introduction to the History, Religion, and Culture of Insular Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
The eleven nation-states that comprise the region of Southeast Asia are defined by their linguistic, cultural, economic, and sociopolitical diversity. One facet that plays a crucial role in binding this region is its environment. In order to explore both how the natural world has shaped the history of Southeast Asia and how the human relationship to the environment has changed over time, this course takes as its focus an examination of how “nature” or the environment in Southeast Asia has been and is being represented through various forms of visual culture. Each week we will focus our inquiry on a different theme including: the history of Hindu/Buddhist temple architecture and the arrival of Islam and its impact on visual representation.
Visual Culture and the Environment in Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2014, Fall 2011, Fall 2009
This course will examine the role of contemporary literature in Indonesian/Malaysian society. Emphasis on the socio-political aspects of this literature in historical context. Genres discussed will include poetry, the novel, the short story, and drama.
Introduction to Modern Indonesian and Malaysian Literature in Translation: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2020
Readings and lectures focus on Thailand, Vietnam and Burma; Cambodian and Laotian materials as available. After brief attention to the influence of oral tradition, classical poetry, and dance drama, emphasis will be on modern novels, short stories, film, and television in their cultural/historical context.
Mainland Southeast Asian Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Spring 2014, Fall 2012
This course examines the impact of the history of literacy and literature upon the ways in which perceptions and roles of women are constructed and reinforced in a developing non-Western society. Course material includes literature, oral and manuscript narratives, ritual performance.
Articulations of the Female in Indonesia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2016
This undergraduate seminar will be an investigation into key discourses on Islam in Southeast Asia, focusing on history, literature, and culture. We will trace the processes through which Islam entered the Malay world in the 13th century, and explore the European colonial encounters with Islam in Southeast Asia and the ways that Islam interacted with and resisted colonialism. We will discuss the role of mysticism and of reformists and will also explore the struggles of Islam as a minority religion in the Philippines and Thailand. Readings will include primary sources in translation, literary texts, ethnographic works, and writings by colonial and local scholars.
Islam and Society in Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2010, Fall 2008, Fall 2006
This seminar will focus on the late colonial and national periods in Southeast Asia. Through literary and political texts as well as classical anthropological sources, we will explore different approaches to reading and analyzing Southeast Asian source material. There will be extensive readings of works of fiction and primary source material in translation, as well as occasional screenings of films. We will tackle broader themes and theoretical approaches to Southeast Asian sources and literatures and will discuss different approaches to reading modern Southeast Asian texts. The course is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.
Southeast Asian Cultures, Texts, and Politics: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2021 First 6 Week Session, Spring 2021, Summer 2020 First 6 Week Session
The course focuses on Philippine history through literature and performance. Among the texts to be discussed are: traditional forms (rituals, poetry, songs, dances) that give insights to belief systems and economic, political, and social life during the indigenous or precolonial period; performance and literary forms that were instruments both of colonial conquest and anti-colonial movements; and theater and literature that participated in discourse on agrarian issues, labor, martial law and militarism, gender rights, academic freedom, and human rights.
Philippines: History, Literature, Performance: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021, Fall 2019
An introduction to the mythologies of Southeast Asia, providing a comparative overview of key myths. We will focus on indigenous narrative traditions encompassing myths of creation and origin, agricultural and maritime myths and practices, the founding of kingdoms, and indigenous geographies. We will further explore the role of myth in the contemporary world.
Southeast Asian Mythology: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2020 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2019 Second 6 Week Session
We will be reading Philippine myths, legends, indigenous poetry and epics. This
includes traditional narrative forms such as the alamat (legends) and the kuwentong-bayan
(folktales) and poetic forms such as the ambahan, diona, and tanaga. Among the
questions the course explores are: How can we understand the way of life and belief
systems of the ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippines through their literatures? How do
the dynamics between orality and literacy come into play in these Filipino literary texts?
How have traditional forms been revitalized and transformed by writers to articulate
contemporary concerns such as poverty, land reform, women’s issues, and human rights?
Filipino Mythology: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2024 10 Week Session, Summer 2023 10 Week Session, Summer 2021 Second 6 Week Session
The course brings students on a research trip to the Philippines to learn through interviews and interactions with Filipino people, selected lectures by
the Philippines’ leading scholars and interactive activities with the Philippines’ artists and
writers.

Philippines: Narratives of Tradition and Resistance: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2021 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2020 First 6 Week Session, Summer 2019 First 6 Week Session
Can a song inspire a revolution? The course focuses on literary, visual, and performance texts that participated in political discourses in the Philippines. What strategies did the writers and artists employ? How did writers and artists face issues of censorship and persecution? How did social movements influence these texts, and in turn, how did these texts contribute to these social movements?
Philippine Cultural Politics: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Summer 2021 First 6 Week Session
Have you tasted sinigang, lumpia, adobo, or for the adventurous, even balut? This seminar course focuses on Philippine cuisine and literary works that use Filipino food as inspiration, theme, or metaphor. Each class uses a particular dish, cooking method, or Filipino ingredient as a starting point in the discussion of Philippine literature, culture, and history. Each lesson has several components: a literary text, recipe/s, a participative class activity and an essay(s) that will help the students to have a better understanding of Philippine society.
Philippine Cuisine Narratives: Sinigang Stories: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2022, Spring 2018, Spring 2014
This course deals with the Dutch colonial history of Indonesia, the former Dutch East Indies. After studying the importance of the East India Company in Southeast Asia and the history of Indonesia under colonial rule, we analyze a number of works in Dutch literature and film with a focus on post-colonialism and interculturality. This course intends to give an opportunity to those who do not have a command of Dutch language, but wish to complete their knowledge of Southeast-Asian history and culture. All materials will be in English, no knowledge of Dutch is required.
DUTCH C164 The Indonesian Connection: Dutch (Post)colonial History and Culture in Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2023

This course is a cultural history of the Philippines, from the birth of the nation in the nineteenth century to the present. It outlines the major events in Philippine history through cultural texts that reflect the salient attitudes and ideas of key periods. Not only will this course cover canonical works, it will also examine popular texts. Expect to discuss everything from anti-colonial novels, Tagalog garage rock, third world brutalism, Manila disco, power ballads, protest songs, romantic comedies, to contemporary crime dramas.
Introduction to the History and Culture of the Philippines: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2020
This course uses biographies to narrate the history of modern Southeast Asia. It will not only examine prominent individuals who have shaped history, but also ordinary lives that reflect this history. This course will also investigate life writing as a non-fiction genre. For the final requirement, students will write a short biography of a Southeast Asian of their choice.
Southeast Asian Life Writing: Biography and the History of the Everyday: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
This course is an overview of Philippine culture from the mid-twentieth century until present, with an emphasis on film, pop music, television, popular journalism, and food cultures. It examines the evolution of Philippine culture in light of broadcast and digital media.
Contemporary Popular Cultures of the Philippines: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
Together we will read and view a variety of stories—told primarily in the form of prose fiction, poetry, essays, films and other visual art—by Vietnamese and overseas Vietnamese writers and artists who explore the consequences of colonialism, war, migration and resettlement for individuals, families and communities using vastly different aesthetic techniques and registering multiple social, cultural, political and personal concerns. We will attend especially to the ways in which war and postwar generation artists and writers define and refine what it means to be Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese in changing local, regional and global contexts, and how the past and present continue to be intertwined in our lives and narratives.
Narratives of Vietnam and Vietnamese Diaspora: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021
This seminar will explore the cultural, economic, social, political and religious history of th​e Chinese diaspora in 19​ to 21​ century Southeast Asia. Our focus is the shifting contexts of migration, representation and strategies of cultural identification/survival. We will explore colonial and nationalist projects, both in Southeast Asia and in China, to categorize “Overseas” Chinese through policies of taxation, and examine cultural flows, the role of religious and educational and associations and institutions, print and cinematic media, and material culture. Our primary focus countries are Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand.
Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021
This Upper Division, seminar-style class introduces students to the modern history and politics of Southeast Asia, from the 1940s to the 2010s, through the lens of cinema and the frame of memory. From American B-Movies to Japanese anti-war features, media monarchs to Indie film-makers, spectral spouses to exorcist monks, Cambodian Claymation to Indonesia film noir, we explore cinema as a vehicle of propaganda, remembrance, experimentation, repression, expression and resistance – but most of all, as a theater of memory.
Southeast Asian Cinema: History, Memory, Politics: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2022
This course offers an advanced introduction to the literary history, cultural norms,
poetic forms and textual traditions of 17 th  to 19 th  century Southeast Asia through a
comparative study of three epic poems:  Tum Teav (Cambodia), Khun Chang Khun
Phaen (Thailand), and Tale of Kieu (Vietnam).  We will explore the dynamics of desire
and transgression, duty and sacrifice, kinship and kingship, and the interplay between
folk, court, Buddhist, Confucian, and Hindu values.  Finally, we will consider the
contemporary currency and iconic status of these works in Southeast Asia and in
diaspora; what makes a national canon, and why these epic tales of love, loss and war,
remain strangers to the west.
Love Craft: Epic Romance of Southeast Asia: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Not yet offered
Tutorial instruction in areas not covered by regularly scheduled courses. Four-unit limit per term.
Directed Group Study for Upper Division Students: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Not yet offered
Four-unit limit per term.
Supervised Independent Study and Research: Read More [+]