- Cafes, Bathhouses, and Pleasure Quarters: Encounters in Early Modern Asia

Catalog description

Explores early modern empires in Asia from the 15th through the 18th centuries, focusing on the Mughal empire, the Ottoman empire, and the Tokugawa shogunate from a variety of perspectives, including trade, cross-cultural encounters and exchanges, cosmopolitanism(s), gender, pleasure, and materiality, as they interplay with constructions of power and identity. Throughout we examine the functions and roles of images, objects, and spaces in fashioning, displaying, and representing self and empire. This course challenges western misconceptions of these empires, their diverse cultures, and of Muslims and Japanese people(s) even as we realize significant elements of their cultural production have been, ironically, misread as foundational to western culture.