The purpose of this course is to introduce graduate students to the tools, methods, and history of sinology. Sinology refers to the study of China as performed in a philological manner. Philology refers to the historical study of language and literature in its fullest context. It is inherently interdisciplinary. It draws on the fields of…[Read more]

This course introduces students to the grammar and vocabulary of Classical Chinese. Readings cover a range of texts and genres from the early and medieval periods, with a few examples from later periods. Students should already have some familiarity with Chinese characters (Hànzì 漢字, Kanji, Hanja), whether through Mandarin Chinese or another East…[Read more]

This article examines the centrality of hunger and food in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, The Heart of Redness, and The Whale Caller. While Mda’s work has been the subject of incisive readings of the politics of development in contemporary South Africa, attention to his treatment of hunger, specifically, helps to clarify the centrality of gender to…[Read more]

This paper examines three FEMRITE collections of ‘true life stories’, Today You Will Understand (2008), Farming Ashes (2009), and I Dare to Say (2012), all of which include testimony of women’s experiences of war in northern Uganda. While these volumes explicitly aim to abet a project of national awareness and reconciliation, they also sel…[Read more]

This paper examines cosmopolitanism in Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011). The protagonists of both texts maintain cosmopolitan identities largely by embracing an international literary culture in which elite cosmopolitan fiction relays the experiences of marginalized cosmopolitan subjects such as migrant workers a…[Read more]

During the second South African War (1899–1902), also known as the Anglo-Boer War, the British
War Office supervised the transportation of approximately 24,000 South African prisoners of
war to Bermuda, St. Helena, and British India. Examining previously unstudied memoirs published
immediately following the war by war prisoners held in camps i…[Read more]

This article sets the itineracy of antiapartheid expressive culture to work in relation to exiled South African jazz singer Miriam Makeba. It revisits accounts of transnational cultural circulation on the part of Rob Nixon, Paul Gilroy, and others to argue that the diffusion of South African cultural formations outward from South Africa offers…[Read more]

In this essay, I trace the deep time of the Indian Ocean through and against which Shailja Patel fabulates the notion of migritude and, in particular, what its valences are for solidarities between black and brown Kenyans and other south-south relationships. Attentive to the multiple voices she invites into the text and the material objects that…[Read more]

This paper examines the voluminous “poetry talks” (shihua) written by Southern Society (Nanshe) members and focuses on two tendencies in these discourses: The general cult of sentimentality and the narrative strategy on women’s poetry. These poetic discourses succeeded the language of traditional literary criticism, but also exhibited ideals of th…[Read more]

This paper examines the birth of classicist poetry by paying attention to the Southern Society’s (Nanshe) diachronic succession of the late Qing Poetic Revolution. It provides a careful analysis on the novelty of Huang Zunxian’s poetry and shows how the Southern Society transformed Huang’s Europeanized innovation into something that was roote…[Read more]