Encountering Chinese Culture: Performing Tradition, Engendering Transformations

This course will introduce students to the Chinese civilization through its rich cultural beliefs, norms, and values from pre-modern China to modern and contemporary eras, including the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora. For the pre-modern section of this course, we will engage two role-playing games through a program called Reacting to the Past (RTTP). As students progress in the class, they will become more adept at crafting arguments, learning to work and to communicate with others, and understanding how the past still informs our present struggles. In the second half of the semester, students are presented with modern and contemporary ideologies and cultural discourses surrounding the idea of the Chinese identity. Through political speeches, realist stories, dystopian science fiction, cinematic comedies, martial arts movies, and Asian diaspora on American screens, we will engage with notions such as reality, realism, love, revolution, irony, utopia, dystopia, in order to look at how different ideologies and cultural beliefs are performed by different historical agents, as well as their social and political implications. This course is only for first-year, non-transfer students in the Encountering Chinese Culture Ampersand Program.
Course Attributes: BU Hum; BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; AMP; FA HUM; AR HUM; EN H

Encountering Chinese Culture: Performing Tradition, Engendering Transformations

DANCE 1080

Section 01