The first congress of representatives of the peoples of the East loudly proclaims to the whole world. To the capitalist rulers of Britain: This shall not be! You dogs will not devious the peoples of the east. You, a wretched handful of oppressors, will not reduce to everlasting serfdom hundred of millions of Eastern workers and peasants. You have bitten off too big a piece, more than you can chew, and it will choke you!
— Manifesto to the Peoples of the East (1920)
Schedule
Week 1
Introduction: History, the library, the internet
I. Frameworks and Guides
Week 2
What is Asia?
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “One Asia, or Many? Reflections From Connected History,” Modern Asian Studies 50:1 (2016), 5-43.
Rabindranath Tagore, “Asia’s Response to the Call of the New Age,” Modern Review 52:4 (1932), 369-373.
Week 3
What’s the point of Transnational Asian Thought?
Milinda Banerjee, Decolonize Intellectual History! An Agenda for the Capitalocene https://jhiblog.org/2021/05/19/decolonize-intellectual-history/
Loubna El Amine, "Beyond East and West: A reorientation of political theory through the prism of modernity," Perspectives on Politics (March 2016).
Optional:
Raymond Williams, “Intellectual” Keywords (1976)
Week 4
Comparison vs. Connection
C.A. Bayly, “Indian and Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age,” Hanssen and Weiss, Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda (2016), 325-350.
Noor-Aiman Khan, “A Tale of Two Nationalisms,” in Egyptian-Indian Nationalist Collaboration and the British Empire (2011), 13-31.
Optional:
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Global Intellectual History Beyond Hegel or Marx,” History and Theory 54:1 (2015), 126-137.
II. The Content and Conditions of Thought
Week 5
Travel and the Limits of Asia
Selections from Yosano Akiko, Travels in Manchuria and Mongolia: A Feminist Poet from Japan Encounters Prewar China (1928)
Optional:
Selections from: Shibli Nu’mani, Turkey, Egypt, and Syria: A Travelogue (1897) translated by Gregory Maxwell Bruce.
Mariusz Kałczewiak, “Anticolonial Orientalism: Perets Hirshbeyn’s Indian Travelogue,” In geveb: A Journal of Yiddish Studies (July 2019) https://ingeveb.org/articles/anticolonial-orientalism
Rabindranath Tagore, Journey to Persia and Iraq, 1932
Week 6
Asia Against Europe I
Benoy Sarkar, “The Futurism of Young Asia,” (1918).
Nguyen Thuong Hien, “Tearful Conversation over the Mulberry Fields and the Sea,” (1912 or 1913)
Optional:
Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” American Historical Review 117:5 ( 2012), pp. 1461-1485
David G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885-1925 (1980)
Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, Asian Place, Filipino Nation A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887–1912 (2020)
Week 7
Asia Against Europe II
Rebecca Karl, “Creating Asia: China in the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century” American Historical Review Vol. 103, No. 4 (Oct., 1998), pp. 1096-1118.
Optional:
Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui, Beyond Pan-Asianism Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s (2021)
Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (2005)
Sunil Amrith, “Gazing at the Stars,” History Workshop Journal (2008)
Week 8
“Eastern Women”
Hi-Yen Zhen, “On the Question of Women’s Liberation” and “On Feminist Antimilitarism,” in Liu, Karl, and Ko, eds., The Birth of Chinese Feminism 53-71; 167-184.
Optional:
Shobna Nijhawan, “International Feminism from an Asian Center: The All-Asian Women’s Conference (Lahore, 1931) as a Transnational Feminist Moment,” Journal of Women's History 29:3 (2017), 12-36.
Anup Grewal, “Transnational Socialist Imaginary and the Proletarian Woman in China,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.2 (2013): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2218>
Week 9
Asian Communism
Nergis Ertürk, “Baku Literary Common,” (2014) https://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/baku-literary-common
Selections from Riddel, ed., To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920–First Congress of the Peoples of the East (1993).
M.P.T. Acharya, “Anarchist Manifesto,” (1926) in We Are Anarchists (2019), edited by Ole Birk Laursen.
Optional:
Ole Birk Laursen, “'I have only One Country, it is the World': Madame Cama, Anticolonialism, and Indian-Russian Revolutionary Networks in Paris, 1907–17,” History Workshop Journal (2021)
Week 10
Asia Abroad
Selections from: Har Dayal, Forty-four Months in Germany and Turkey (1920)
Selections from the newspaper The United States of India https://www.saada.org/browse/source/the-united-states-of-india
Michael Goebel, “Learning and Imparting Lessons in Anti-Imperialism: Students in the Latin Quarter,” in Anti-Imperial Metropolis Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (2015), 116-136.
Optional:
Mai Ramnath, Haj to Utopia How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (2011)
Renisa Mawani, Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (2018)
Week 11
Asia’s Last Stand?
G.H. Jansen, “Dawn: The Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, March 1947,” in Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (1966), 51-75
Optional:
Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54:1 (2012)
Week 12
Presentations
