Cathryn Clayton
The region we call "Asia" is home to more than half the world's population and several of the world's fastest-growing economies. It is both source of and destination for increasingly torrential flows of people, goods, ideas, cultures and capital, and already plays a key role in the global political arena.
This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to some of the problems and issues affecting peoples and institutions of contemporary Asia. Through films, novels, essays, news reports and other primary documents as well as academic texts, we will look to Asia's past as well as to its future, tracing the social and political impact of such phenomena as colonialism, revolution, nationalism, economic development and globalization, and asking how they intersect with changing ideas about tradition and modernity, religion, gender, family, and the environment -- and, in doing so, how they impact the lives of individuals in Asia across the socioeconomic spectrum.