Readings, lectures, and discussion of the culture and civilization of Southeast Asia. Mainland Southeast Asia: Covers the modern-day nations of Burma, Cambodia, Thailand, etc., with special emphasis on the impact of Hinduism and Buddhism. (F,SP) Staff

Readings, lectures, and discussion of the culture and civilization of Southeast Asia. Insular Southeast Asia: Covers the modern-day nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Special emphasis on the arts and their social and political context, with discussions on the impact of the colonial experience and the question of modernization vs. tradition.

This course will examine the role of contemporary literature in Indonesian/Malaysian society. Emphasis on the socio-political aspects of this literature in historical context. Genres discussed will include poetry, the novel, the short story, and drama.

Readings and lectures focus on Thailand, Vietnam and Burma; Cambodian and Laotian materials as available. After brief attention to the influence of oral tradition, classical poetry, and dance drama, emphasis will be on modern novels, short stories, film, and television in their cultural/historical context.

This course examines the impact of the history of literacy and literature upon the ways in which perceptions and roles of women are constructed and reinforced in a developing non-Western society. Course material includes literature, oral and manuscript narratives, ritual performance.

This undergraduate seminar will be an investigation into key discourses on Islam in Southeast Asia, focusing on history, literature, and culture. We will trace the processes through which Islam entered the Malay world in the 13th century, and explore the European colonial encounters with Islam in Southeast Asia and the ways that Islam interacted with and resisted colonialism. We will discuss the role of mysticism and of reformists and will also explore the struggles of Islam as a minority religion in the Philippines and Thailand. Readings will include primary sources in translation, literary texts, ethnographic works, and writings by colonial and local scholars.

This seminar will focus on the late colonial and national periods in Southeast Asia. Through literary and political texts as well as classical anthropological sources, we will explore different approaches to reading and analyzing Southeast Asian source material. There will be extensive readings of works of fiction and primary source material in translation, as well as occasional screenings of films. We will tackle broader themes and theoretical approaches to Southeast Asian sources and literatures and will discuss different approaches to reading modern Southeast Asian texts. The course is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students.

Major themes in modern Southeast Asian history with an emphasis on cross-country comparisons involving the region's largest and most populous countries: Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

In postcolonial thought on European claims to cultural supremacy, the case of the "Dutch East-Indies" (the future Indonesia) still arouses questions like: What made the Dutch colonial policy different from that of other European powers? What were the main characteristics of the "Dutch East-Indies"? How did a small country like the Netherlands manage to rule a territory that was fifty-two times its own in scale? And how can we explain that 350 years of Dutch domination left so few traces in contemporary Indonesia?