Language, Nation, and Diaspora in East Asia and the World

Catalog description

This course examines the nexus between language, nation, and diaspora by bringing literary and cultural texts together with foundational and cutting-edge scholarship. Recent scholarship has attempted to account for the history, politics, aesthetics, and rich complexity of texts produced at or across the boundaries of national and linguistic communities. This course focuses on East Asia in the modern period and the texts produced by diasporic, migrant, exile, and other global communities thereof in order to investigate and reconsider how scholars might account for such texts. Topics for discussion include, for example: diaspora and migration, cosmopolitanism and universalism, nation and nationalism, translation and multilingualism, media and mediation, gender and sexuality, and the human and posthuman. Our readings will include a wide range of scholarship drawn from across disciplines and regions of focus, as well as literary, cultural, and cinematic texts which will allow us to think through the ideas put forth in scholarship.