This team-taught seminar, required of all majors in the College of East Asian Studies (CEAS), is for sophomores who have joined CEAS. It is also open to junior and senior CEAS majors who were unable to take the course their sophomore year. The course introduces majors to a range of the fields and methodologies that comprise East Asian studies at Wesleyan. The material will be organized into several disciplinary and area modules, each contributing to a central theme. For Spring 2017, the organizing theme is "Cooking, Consuming East Asia." The course will examine foodways as expressions of how societies in East Asia and beyond construct ("cook") their fluctuating identities and perform ("consume") them. Orientalism, food adventurism, gender roles, food nationalism, wartime diets, famines, conceptions of disgust, environmentalism, technology, and globalization will be some of the larger themes. Although we will discuss particular dishes and their histories as examples of socioeconomic dynamics, the focus of this course is on values, fears, and the cultural forces at play behind those culinary expressions. |