EALC025 - Chinese Popular Culture

This course explores the cultural landscapes of twentieth-century China and beyond through the lens of "popular culture." We will familiarize ourselves with some key approaches in modern cultural studies, while learning to critically interpret literary, musical, and visual texts in the Chinese-speaking world in social and historical context. Topics include orality and folk culture, media and mass culture, the local and the global, and politics and popular culture. We will emerge from the course with a new set of tools in thinking about "culture" both familiar and unfamiliar. No previous knowledge of Asia is required.