Seminar on Global Society I

This course is more about ideas than content. It seeks to unfold and interrogate how history, as a discipline, operates to produce the past, the present, and even the future. Through unravelling the relation between these categories of time, students should get a sense of how politics and history converge in the present moment. To explore these ideas we will focus on the historiography of modern Japan. The aim is to introduce students to various approaches to the study of history to see how Japan was constituted as an object of study. The latter part of the course will then focus on special topics (such as empire, race, popular culture, etc.) in order to examine how the past has been conceptualized and historicized.