14026GH

SoSe 20: Paradise in Asia: Utopianism and Visions of Felicity in Premodern and Modern East Asian History

Urs Matthias Zachmann

Information for students

This class will be taught online (i.e. there is no classroom attendance) using Blackboard, podcasts and, where appropriate, streaming. For further details consult the instructions on Blackboard

Comments

This course in the cultural and intellectual history of East Asia (with a special focus on Japan) looks from a theoretically grounded perspective on particular ways and strategies that individuals and societies in premodern and modern East Asia envisioned ideal states, either of individual or collective happiness. Hopes and longings are a strong motivator for people across the world, and they tell much about the individual as well as the society they belong to, about their private aspirations as well the culture that shapes them and the history that preconditions then. Utopias and visions of happiness thus are a fascinating prism through which we can observe the live of individuals as well as cultures in East Asia. How did premodern Japanese envision an ideal society or their own private way to happiness? How was this prefigured or conditioned by cultural adaptations from China or Korea? How did these East Asian neighbours envision their nation’s progress towards a blissful state? How did Western modernity affect these dreams and longings, and did thinkers and dreamers come up with a particular answer to be happy at all in modern times? Some of the subjects discussed in the course are: - Utopian thought in ancient China, especially Daoism - Visions of the ideal state in premodern East Asian political theory - Pictorial representations of Paradise in premodern Buddhism - the Japanese school of Nativism (kokugaku) as a form of Japanese Romanticism - Religious Sectarianism in 19th, esp. the “Heavenly Kingdom” (Taiping tianguo) - the “East” as orientalist paradise in the West - Alternative lifestyles and the commune in prewar Japan - utopian science fiction-writing in 19th and 20th century East Asia - Panasianism: Asia as communal paradise - the Kyoto School of philosophy and political utopianism - wartime ideas of postwar under Japanese dominion - student revolts in the 1960s and their visions of future society - consumer paradise, or the death of utopia in East Asia? close