HIST 2400 Digital and Critical Approaches to Asian History, Fall 2020

Days & Times: We 3-5:25pm
Room: 325 Thackeray Hall
Instructor: Raja Adal
This course is a pre-approved elective for Fall 2020.

This course approaches Asia not as a geographic place but as a malleable object of study. In exploring "Asia," each week will adopt a different guide. One week will ask about the map of Asia that various Asian religions would create, depending on which religion did the mapping. Another week will ask how various modern pan-Asian movements imagined Asia. What happens to our conception of Asia if we adopt Confucianism as our guide? Or the Chinese writing system, the Devanagari writing system, the Arabic alphabet, or non-Latin alphabets put together? What happens if we think of Asia in terms of its physical environment? How have the ways in which we understand environmental history changed our understanding of what Asia might, or might not, consist of? What about early modern empires, old and new trade networks, or Asian diasporas? In this way, this course will explore a multiplicity of Asias, each of which is created as much by Asia as an object of study as by the position from which we approach it. Classes will consist of two parts. The first will discuss key works of recent scholarship and the second will think critically about primary sources. This will include thinking about what types of primary sources each of the readings has used, where these sources might be found, what they reveal, and what they obscure. But it will also encourage students to think about what other sources, whether textual, visual, quantitative, or otherwise, could provide alternative perspectives. This will include looking for datasets that can be used to think about each approach to Asia systematically. What datasets could help us map languages in Asia? How have scholars used big data to trace Confucian networks? How could data provide a different approach to Asian diasporas. In addition to weekly readings and short response papers, students will write a final paper that will seek to integrate into their own research some of the approaches discussed in the course.