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GWSS 446 / ANTH 442 / JSIS A 452: Global Asia [course poster]

Spring 2024
Time: TTh 1:30-3:20
Classroom: Chemistry Library Building 015

Instructor

Professor Sasha Su-Ling Welland (she/her/hers)

Email: swelland@uw.edu*
Office Hours: Mon 2:00-3:00 (sign up here)
Office: Padelford Hall B-110L (inside main GWSS office)

*Please note: Every effort will be made to respond to email within 72 hours.

About the Course

Course Description

This course examines the idea of Asia as it has been constructed through various global encounters, including imperialism; revolutionary anti-colonialism; transnational labor, markets and kinship; and globalizing forms of culture. Guided by a feminist analytic, we will pay attention to: 1) the role of gender as it intersects with other vectors of power, such as race and class; and 2) questions of social justice in these encounters. Our sites of inquiry range from factory floor to forest floor, from call center to fertility clinic, from game play to spiritual movement, from international politics to intimate family relations. We will analyze the social, political, and economic effects of global circulations of people, things, ideas, social practices, and cultural representations. We will explore how about ideas about Asia’s place in the world emerge out of claims of commonality and distinction made by different people moving throughout the region.

Yanagi Yukinori, The World Ant FarmYanagi Yukinori, The World Ant Farm

Students in the course build a shared vocabulary through a keyword research project, compiled at the end of the quarter in a Global Asia Illustrated Compendium of Keywords.

The motion of each keyword, and possible networks of connection between them, might be likened to that of the ants released in Yukinori Yanagi's The World Ant Farm. The artwork consists of 182 Perspex boxes linked by plastic tubes. Each box is filled with colored gardening sand to create the pattern of a national flag. As the ants move through the boxes, they create tunnels through the sand and carry the colors from one to another. The clear patterns of the flags begin to disintegrate. As the Tate Modern website entry for the work above indicates, the title Pacific "acts as a seemingly neutral reference to a geographical region, yet through the co-presence of flags representing recognized nations, former colonial powers and indigenous peoples, the work acknowledges the contestation of territorial authority and national identities that characterizes the area’s history."

Our travels over the quarter will immerse us in debates about boundary making, knowledge production, and identity formation as they take place through cross-border movements. Boundaries—their maintenance and transgression—matter because they produce social distinctions, embedded in specific contexts, and are used to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space. We will explore, largely through ethnographic accounts, the everyday sociocultural practices that make, maintain, and modify intersecting categories such as race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality. Throughout this process, one of our goals will be to challenge conventional, dichotomous mappings of East versus West. We will examine “Asia” not as a geographic given but a cultural construction created through heterogeneous interactions and whose boundaries shift in response to political and economic dynamics.

This course is cross-listed in Anthropology, Asian Studies, and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and thus poses an additional challenge to the question of boundaries as they relate to academic disciplines and their methods of constructing knowledge about Asia and globalization. The challenge and the promise of such an interdisciplinary endeavor is to learn from each other’s expertise and experience; to build a shared vocabulary that integrates a variety of perspectives and approaches; and in the process, to imagine new, more complex ways of understanding the world. Students will be pushed to go beyond their disciplinary comfort zone and to try out other languages, perspectives, and forms of analysis. Think of this class as an experimental, border-crossing space, in which you will learn to think across macro and micro scales of analysis to develop lines of critical and creative inquiry.

The course readings start with a grounding in disciplinary and theoretical approaches to the questions of Asian area studies formation and globalization, and then take us on a roughly chronological route, beginning with late nineteenth-century colonial movements and arriving at contemporary cultural encounters shaped by transnational capitalism. The readings transit through multiple locations, including East Asia, West Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia, as well as sites in the Americas and Africa. By considering points of connection between these places, we will unpack celebratory claims and freighted anxieties about where Asia begins and ends.

There is nothing exhaustive about the geographic purview of the readings (the quarter is simply too short). Rather, the course materials suggest a starting point for us to collaboratively consider what Asia was, is, and might be; how it came to be an identifiable place on modern maps through multiple transnational circuits; and the significance of articulating Global together with Asia. Students with expertise in any of these or related locales are encouraged to provide historical depth and introduce further examples and materials that will push our thinking about how we define regions.

This is an upper-level course, which combines mini-lectures by the instructor with in-depth, seminar-style discussion. Direction will be given on how to read and prepare for active class engagement.

For GWSS Majors & Minors: This class fulfills the following requirements: Global Identity Formations and Decolonizing Empire focus points; Transnational Perspective, and Upper-Division Elective.

Course Objectives

  • To understand how shifting ideas of Asia and its place in the world have been constructed through a variety of global, and often gendered, interactions.
  • To examine what globalization, in terms of historical and contemporary movements and cultural encounters, means to different social actors in Asia.
  • To analyze how boundaries—in terms of categories such as race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality—are made, maintained, and modified through everyday, sociocultural practices and how these boundaries support particular power relations.
  • To engage in a deep and sustained interdisciplinary conversation that will challenge all of our ways of approaching the question of what Global Asia means.
  • To develop creative, innovative academic work, including a class-produced compendium of keywords related to Global Asia. This compendium will expand ways of understanding the historical and contemporary implications of Asia’s role in processes of globalization.
  • To develop competencies in research and knowledge sharing.

Course Texts

Readings: All assigned book chapters and articles will be available through weekly Canvas Course site modules and in Files. 

Books: Available at The University Bookstore (listed in the order we will read them); all three are also available as eBooks through the UW Libraries (unlimited users, links in Canvas)

Course Reserves

The following books have also been requested for reserve at the Tateuchi East Asia Library.

On the syllabus (alphabetical by author’s last name; *denotes UW Libraries ebook availability):

  • *Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination
  • Elisabeth B. Armstrong, Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949
  • *Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace
  • *Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
  • Winnie Won Yin Wong, Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade

For inspiration for our class-produced Global Asia Illustrated Compendium of Keywords:

Assignments & Evaluation

Each student’s performance will be evaluated as follows:

  • Class Participation :10%
  • Discussion Board Posts (3 total, 5% each): 15%
  • Take-Home Midterm: 20%
  • Keyword Entry (revised from midterm draft): 15%
  • Research Cluster Presentation: 10%
  • Final Paper: 30%

Grading Criteria (GWSS departmental grading scale):

  • 4.0 – achievement outstanding relative to the level necessary to meet course requirements
  • 3.0 – achievement significantly above the level necessary to meet course requirements
  • 2.0 – achievement meeting the basic course requirements in every respect
  • 1.0 – achievement worthy of credit that does not meet basic course requirements

Class Participation: Active participation in each class session is a requirement of this course. Attendance, a pre-requisite of participation, is therefore critical. You are responsible for completing the assigned readings, before the class meeting for which they are listed, and preparing for discussion. (The GWSS weekly reading expectation for a 400-level course is 100-140 pages; the UW academic credit expectation is 15 hours of student time commitment per week for a 5 credit course.)  Reflection handouts will be provided throughout the quarter to guide your engagement with the readings and to spark small and large group discussion. Everyone is encouraged to be a thoughtful discussant and to raise questions, in class and through comments posted on the course discussion boards. Please bring the assigned texts in either hard or digital form to class each day so that you can refer to them.

Discussion Board: Three posts (approximately 500 words each) will serve to immerse you in the themes and questions of the course and help you develop ideas for your research project. Prompts for three discussion boards will be posted on the course website as indicated in the schedule below. The board will open at the beginning of the indicated week and close that Friday. Evaluation of posts will include: timeliness, demonstration of understanding of assigned readings, thoughtfulness of ideas and questions posed, and persuasiveness and complexity of the inquiry. These posts will be graded as follows:  check + (5 pts-excellent), check (4 pts-good), or check - (3 pts.-does not fulfill assignment). 

Take-Home Midterm: You will write two short essays: one in response to questions (pick one of three) that review core concepts and debates; and one that is a draft of your keyword entry. 

Keyword Entry: You will craft a keyword entry (approx. 1000 words) for our class-produced Global Asia Illustrated Compendium of Keywords, a collection of vocabulary developed in relation to course concepts, questions, and debates. Keywords are sites of conflict and disagreement, so your entry will reflect two or more different understandings of the world-making term whose histories, usages, and political trajectories you choose to chart. You will be encouraged to be creative in your keyword choice and to work with you research cluster in developing it. You should pick a keyword related to the topic you want to research and explore further in your final paper; in this way, your entry will provide you with ideas and research questions for the final paper. Prompts and examples for this assignment will be posted on the course website and discussed in class. You will complete a first draft of your entry as part of the midterm, receive feedback from your classmates, and then revise your entry.

Research Cluster Presentation: For the last week of class, each research cluster will design and give an interactive presentation that puts cluster members’ keywords in conversation with one another around the cluster’s chosen research theme and raises questions for further discussion. Think of this as a form of collaboration that will help you expand your keyword entry into a research project and receive further feedback from the whole class.

Final Paper: A final 10-page paper is required. The keyword entry assignment will help you identify a topic and set of questions that you want to research and explore further in this paper. You will be expected to do original research using methods introduced in class and to make full use of course concepts and readings in your analysis. You cannot pass the class if you do not complete the final paper.

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Course Summary:

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