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COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS
Lisa Trivedi and Thomas A. Wilson
Hamilton College
Autumn 2001
Class time: WF 1-2:15
Books for purchase (not at campus bookstore):
Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo
Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover
∆ readings on reserve in library
√ Photocopied materials
* Suggested reading
This course examines encounters between Asian and Western peoples from Marco Polo to the present. Focuses on tensions among economic, cultural, and religious aims of Iberian expansion in the East Indies and the Philippines, rising Dutch competition for these territories, and later English and French imperial expansion into southeast and east Asia. Some themes of the course include problems of orientalism/occidentalism and the myth of the Western “impact” on Asia by learning about how Asian peoples understood the West and also about the ways that Europe, too, was affected by these encounters. Thus we are not concerned about how (or whether) the West influenced Asian countries in these encounters, but rather the nature of these contacts and how peoples of different cultures understood those of others.
1. European Explorations and Missions 1/16
“Aguirre, The Wrath of God” ( Germany, 1972), 94 mins. Dir. Werner Herzog
Stephen Minta, “Aguirre, The Wrath of God,” Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Mark C. Carnes (Henry Holt, 1995), 74-77
Clifford Geertz, “Common Sense as a Cultural System”
2. Marco Polo and the Silk Route 1/23
Marco Polo, The Travels, 7-112, 113-259
Jonathan Spence, “The Worlds of Marco Polo,” The Chan’s Great Continent, 1-18
3. Before European Colonialism 1/30
Janet Abu-Lughod, The World Before European Hegemony
Charles Ralph Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600-1800, 1-30
Supplementary readings :
Hugh Clark, “Muslims and Hindus in the Culture and Morphology of Quanzhou from the 10th to the 13th Centuries,” Journal of World History 6 (1995) 1: 49-74
Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, 19-85
4. Conversion Encounters 2/6
Vincente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, xvii-54
“The Mission”
5. European Imaginings of the Orient 2/13
Timothy Billings, “Visible Cities: The Heterotopic Utopia of China in Early Modern European Writing,” Genre 30 (1997): 107-136
Ricci , China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583-1610 ,
David Mungello, “Ricci’s Formulation of Jesuit Accomodation in China” ( Curious Land), 44-73
Supplementary readings :
C.R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650, 41-90
6. Indian Missions 2/20
Ines G. Zupanov, “Aristocratic Analogies and Demotic Descriptions in the Seventeenth-Century Madurai Mission,” Representations 41 (Winter 1993): 123-48
St. François Xavier, text??
7. Early Modern Travelers 2/27
Dean Mahomet, Travels in the Moghul Empire, 1656-1668,
8. Orientalism 3/6
Edward Said, “The Scope of Orientalism” (Orientalism), 4-15, 1-110; 201-25
film on Edward Said
Supplementary readings :
Emily Apter, “Harem: Colonial Fiction and Architectural Fantasm in Turn-of-the-Century France,” Places Through the Body, 119-132
Gerald M. Ackerman, The Life and Work of Jean-Léon Gérôme: His Life, His Work (Sotheby's Publications, 1986)
Picturing the Middle East: A Hundred Years of European Orientalism ,
9. Racialization & Nineteenth-Century European Colonialism 3/27
Ann Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia” (Becoming National), 286-324
Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover
“The Lover,” dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud (France 1991, 113 mins.)
Supplementary readings :
Ann Stoler, “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” Representations (Winter 1992), 151-189
Michael Banton, “The Classification of Races in Europe and North America, 1700-1850,” International Social Science Journal (Feb. 1987), 45-60
March 6: research paper proposal due
thesis statement
paper outline
bibliography (including list of interlibrary loan requests to be submitted before break)
10. Passages 4/3
Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai,
Gauri Vishwanathan, Outside the Fold,
“Passage to India” ( Eng., 1984), 163 mins. Dir. David Lean. Based on E. M. Forster’s novel
11. Nineteenth-Century Protestants and Colonialism 4/10
Karl Friedrich August Gutzlaff (1803-1851), The Journals of Two Voyages along the Coast of China in 1831 & 1832, 1-124
Johannese Fabian, “Religious and Secular Colonization” (Time and the Work of Anthropology), 155-169
“Apocalypse Now” (US, 1979), 153 mins. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. (Adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness)
Frances FitzGerald, “Apocalypse Now,” Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Mark C. Carnes (Henry Holt, 1995), 284-287
Supplementary readings :
Andrew Porter, “Religion and Empire: British Expansion in the Long 19th Century, 1780-1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 20 (Sept. 1992) 3: 370-90
James Hevia, “Leaving a Brand on China, Missionary Discourse in the Wake of the Boxer Movement,” Modern China 18 (1992): 304-332
Otis Cary, A History of Christianity in Japan (New York: F. H. Revell, 1909), 13-241
Toyohiko Kagawa (1888-1960), Christ and Japan ( New York, Friendship Press, 1934)
12. Finding God in China 4/17
William Jones Boone, An Essay on the Proper Rendering of the Words Elohim and Theos into the Chinese Language (Canton: Office of the Chinese Repository, 1848)
James Legge, The Notions of the Chinese concerning Gods and Spirits: with an Examination and Defense of An Essay on the Proper Rendering of the Words Elohim and Theos into the Chinese Language, by William J. Boone, D.D (Hongkong: Hongkong Register, 1852)
Lauren Psister, “Discovering Monotheistic Metaphysics: The Exegetical Reflections of James Legge (1815-1897) and Lo Chung-fan (d. circa. 1850),” Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts, and Hermeneutics, Kai-wing Chow, et al., ed
Supplementary readings :
Murray Rubinstein, The Origins of the Anglo-American Missionary Enterprise in China, 1807-1840 (Scarecrow, 1996)
13. Radical Converts 4/24
“The Taiping Heavenly Chronicle,” The Taiping Rebellion 2: 51-79
Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
14. Hollywood Views of Colonial Encounters 5/1
David Palumbo-Liu, “The Bitter Tea of Frank Capra,” positions 3 (1995) 3: 759-789
“The Bitter Tea of General Yen,” dir. Frank Capra (Columbia Films, 1933)