Syllabus: Transnational Asian Thought (2021)

I have been teaching this course for the last few months. The readings could use some tweaks no doubt, and pandemic conditions remain an impediment, but it was fun. This course is a senior-level, discussion based seminar which culminates in a final research project. The "optional" readings below were listed to help guide students to different kinds of readings and topics as they prepared their final projects.The dearth of translated material—especially of twentieth-century Arabic materials—is a major challenge in teaching a course like this, but there is nevertheless a great deal I could have included which I did not. I have simply posted the reading schedule below, leaving out the assignments and the bureaucratic paratext.


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