Why does Southern Asia’s pre-colonial history matter? Using materials that illustrate the connected worlds of Central Asia, South Asia and the Indian Ocean rim, we will query conventional histories of Asia in the time of European expansion.
Same as HISB53H3

A survey of South Asian history. The course explores diverse and exciting elements of this long history, such as politics, religion, trade, literature, and the arts, keeping in mind South Asia's global and diasporic connections.
Same as HISB57H3

This course provides an overview of the historical changes and continuities of the major cultural, economic, political, and social institutions and practices in modern Chinese history.
Same as HISB58H3

A survey of the art of China, Japan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia. We will examine a wide range of artistic production, including ritual objects, painting, calligraphy, architectural monuments, textile, and prints. Special attention will be given to social contexts, belief systems, and interregional exchanges.
Same as VPHB73H3

An introduction to modern Asian art through domestic, regional, and international exhibitions. Students will study the multilayered new developments of art and art institutions in China, Japan, Korea, India, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as explore key issues such as colonial modernity, translingual practices, and multiple modernism.
Same as VPHB77H3

Using the experience of the Tamil diaspora as a case study, this course examines how ideas of home, identity, gender, politics, belonging, kinship and citizenship are transformed by migration and globalization. Tamil mobility has a long history. It has been shaped by colonial and post-colonial forces, war, labor and global business markets. What are the lived experiences of transnational/refugee families of Tamil communities? How is Tamil romance, marriage and intimacy actualized across national borders? How has mobility shaped Tamil politics, ideas of belonging and home? Through these questions about lived experience and drawing on ethnography fiction, and film, the course will explore debates about race, migration and diaspora, exile and nationalism, gender and immigration regimes. Prior knowledge of Tamil is not required.

This course offers students a critical and analytical perspective on issues of gender history, equity, discrimination, resistance, and struggle facing societies in East and South Asia and their diasporas.

This course critically examines different aspects of Buddhism in global context.

This course examines the complex and dynamic interplay of media and politics in contemporary China, and the role of the government in this process.
Same as MDSC32H3/(MDSC40H3)

This course introduces students to media industries and commercial popular cultural forms in East Asia. Topics include reality TV, TV dramas, anime, and manga as well as issues such as regional cultural flows, global impact of Asian popular culture, and the localization of global media in East Asia.
Same as MDSC14H3/(MDSC41H3)

This course offers students a critical perspective on film and popular cultures in South Asia. Topics include Bombay, Tamil, and other regional filmic industries, their history, production, and distribution strategies, their themes and musical genres, and a critical look at the larger social and political meanings of these filmic cultures.

This course explores the development of colonialism, modernity, and nationalism in modern Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan. Key issues include sexuality, race, medicine, mass media, and consumption.

This course offers students a critical perspective on film and popular cultures in East Asia. The course examines East Asian filmic industries, and the role they play in shaping worldviews, aesthetics, ethical norms, folk beliefs, and other socio-cultural aspects in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan.

This course examines the history of South Asia's partition in 1947, in the process of decolonization, into the independent nation-states of India and Pakistan. Major course themes include nationalism, violence, and memory. Students will read historical scholarship on this topic and also engage with literature, film, oral histories, and photography. Partitioning lands and peoples is an old colonial technology of rule. Why did it become such a compelling solution to the problems of group conflict in the Indian subcontinent and beyond in the twentieth century even after 1947? How did the emergence of different ideas of nationalism – Indian, Pakistani, Hindu, Islamic, and beyond – contribute to this? Why was the Partition of India so violent? What happened to the people who were displaced at the time of Partition? How has the Partition been remembered and narrated and how does it continue to echo through national and regional politics? Beyond the subcontinent's partition into India and Pakistan, the course will introduce comparative case studies of Burma and Sri Lanka, among others.

An introduction to the distinctive East Asian legal tradition shared by China, Japan, and Korea through readings about selected thematic issues. Students will learn to appreciate critically the cultural, political, social, and economic causes and effects of East Asian legal cultures and practices.
Same as HISC56H3

This course addresses literary, historical, ethnographic, and filmic representations of the political economy of China and the Indian subcontinent from the early 19th century to the present day. We will look at such topics as the role and imagination of the colonial-era opium trade that bound together India, China and Britain in the 19th century, anticolonial conceptions of the Indian and Chinese economies, representations of national physical health, as well as critiques of mass-consumption and capitalism in the era of the ‘liberalization’ and India and China’s rise as major world economies. Students will acquire a grounding in these subjects from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives.

Same as HISC51H3

The Silk Routes were a lacing of highways connecting Central, South and East Asia and Europe. Utilizing the Royal Ontario Museum's collections, classes held at the Museum and U of T Scarborough will focus on the art produced along the Silk Routes in 7th to 9th century Afghanistan, India, China and the Taklamakhan regions.
Same as VPHC53H3

A study of the history of China's relationship with the rest of the world in the modern era. The readings focus on China's role in the global economy, politics, religious movements, transnational diasporas, scientific/technological exchanges, and cultural encounters and conflicts in the ages of empire and globalization.
Same as HISC57H3

This course explores the transnational history of Tamil worlds. In addition to exploring modern Tamil identities, the course will cover themes such as mass migration, ecology, social and economic life, and literary history.

Same as HISC59H3

The course will explore the history and career of a term: The Global South. The global south is not a specific place but expressive of a geopolitical relation. It is often used to describe areas or places that were remade by geopolitical inequality. How and when did this idea emerge? How did it circulate? How are the understandings of the global south kept in play? Our exploration of this term will open up a world of solidarity and circulation of ideas shaped by grass-roots social movements in different parts of the world

Same as HISC73H3

This course introduces contemporary Chinese art and visual culture, examining how artists and cultural producers respond to China’s rapid social, economic, and political transformations. We will analyze a range of media—including painting, photography, installation, film, and digital culture—in relation to themes such as globalization, urban change, memory, and identity. The course also considers how Chinese art circulates internationally, situating it within broader global debates in art history and media studies.
Same as VPHC74H3

This course offers an in-depth and historicized study of important cultural issues in historical and contemporary Asian, diasporic and borderland societies, including migration, mobility, and circulation. It is conducted in seminar format with emphasis on discussion, critical reading and writing, digital skills, and primary research.

Same as HISD09H3

This course offers a capstone experience of issues which confront Asian and diasporic societies. Themes include gender, environment, human rights, equity, religion, politics, law, migration, labour, nationalism, post-colonialism, and new social movements. It is conducted in seminar format with emphasis on discussion, critical reading, and writing of research papers.

The course offers an in-depth, special study of important topics in the study of Global Asia. Special topics will vary from year to year depending on the expertise of the visiting professor. It is conducted in seminar format with emphasis on discussion, critical reading, and writing of research papers.

An exploration of the global problem of crime and punishment. The course investigates how the global processes of colonialism, industrialization, capitalism and liberalization affected modern criminal justice and thus the state-society relationship and modern citizenry in different cultures across time and space.
Same as HISD06H3

What is violence? How do we study violence and its impact? How do people subjected to violence communicate, cope and live with violence? The course is designed to study South Asian communities through the concept of violence by exploring various texts. By looking at the various cases, structures and concepts in relation to violence in different parts of South Asia the course will analyze and understand how forms of violence transfigure, impact, make and remake individual life, and communities within and beyond South Asia. We will analyze different forms of violence from structural, symbolic to discreet and every-day expressions of violence. The course closely looks at how, on the one hand, violence operates in the everyday life of people and how it creates social suffering, pain, silence, loss of voice, difficulties of communicating the experience of violence, etc. On the other hand, the course will focus on how ordinary people who were subjected to violence cope, live, recover and rebuild their life during and in the aftermath of violence.

This seminar examines the transformation and perpetuation of gender relations in contemporary Chinese societies. It pays specific attention to gender politics at the micro level and structural changes at the macro level through in-depth readings and research.
Same as SOCD20H3

This course examines how popular culture projects its fantasies and fears about the future onto Asia through sexualized and racialized technology. Through the lens of techno-Orientalism this course explores questions of colonialism, imperialism and globalization in relation to cyborgs, digital industry, high-tech labor, and internet/media economics. Topics include the hyper-sexuality of Asian women, racialized and sexualized trauma and disability. This course requires student engagement and participation. Students are required to watch films in class, and creative assignments such as filmmaking and digital projects are encouraged.
Same as WSTD30H3

The Chinese government has played a central role in the development of print, electronic and digital media. Recent changes in the political economy of Chinese media have had strong political and cultural implications. This senior seminar course examines the complex and dynamic interplay of media and politics in contemporary China.

This seminar course examines the First World War in its imperial and colonial context in Africa and Asia. Topics include forgotten fronts in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, colonial armies and civilians, imperial economies and resources, the collapse of empires and the remaking of the colonial world.

Same as AFSD53H3 and HISD53H3