ASIAN 4494

Topics in Southeast Asian Studies

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2022-2023.

A topics course related to Southeast Asian Studies. Spring Topic: Movement and Memory: Explorations of Southeast Asian Hip Hop Culture. Much existing scholarship in Southeast Asian Studies on popular music focuses on traditional and folk music, with a substantial number of recent works exploring rock & roll, punk, and metal across the region. Although Hip Hop is the global break-out genre of the 21st century, influencing everything from K-Pop to Indonesian heavy metal, shockingly few scholars directly address the social history of Hip Hop in the region. Fewer still do so from a thematic and comparative perspective, rather than nation-bounded inquiries. In this course, we will adopt a trans-pacific lens to facilitate our explorations, connecting the innovations of diaspora communities in the Americas to those in Southeast Asia. We will examine the movements –  social, musical, and physical – of Southeast Asian performance artists, while we will also consider the role of memory in terms of how histories are interpreted and inform artistic understandings of lyric and aesthetic. As music is ultimately experiential, while students will write and reflect on reading in the course, our emphasis will be on discussion of how we also experience movement and memory in this context. For the cumulative assignment in this course, students will design their own productive segment of a radio show, podcast, or similar format of their choosing.

When Offered Spring.

Course Subfield (SC)

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