Team-taught & dual-located online certificate course: “Pacific Rim Discourse: World-Making Practices”
Rob Sean Wilson (University of California at Santa Cruz & the Farm System)
Shiuhuhuah Serena Chou (Academia Sinica, Taiwan & Farm for Change)
Course Dates
10 Weeks from Monday September 26 until Friday December 2
UCSC LIT 133F: online via Zoom Monday & Wednesday 5:20-6:55PM California time
Academia Sinica: online via Zoom Tuesday & Thursday 8:20-9:55AM Taiwan time
Course Description
This “Pacific Rim Discourse: World-Making Practices” is an online dual-located course, team-taught by Rob Wilson in California & Serena Chou in Taiwan. Through selected readings and films, we will study discursive-cultural as well as historical-material shifts of the “transpacific” world from Pacific Island and Pacific Rim to Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific while towards a more environmental vision of Oceania. Discourse, in Foucault’s epistemic sense, creates cultural politics in both expressive and repressive senses of world-making imagination. Besides the ecological perspectives we study, Professor Chou will bring these ideas into focus via visits to the “rooftop eco-garden” and Farm for Change at Academia Sinica to model environmental worlding on local/national/ global scales. Rob Wilson will also visit the Farm at UCSC to discuss “green activism” that arose there from the early 1970s to the present.
Texts and films we will read may include: Norman O. Brown, “My Georgics,” Serena Chou, “Cultivating Nature,” Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” poems by Joe Balaz, John Pule, and Teresia Teiawa, David Henry Hwang/ David Cronenberg, M. Butterfly, David Mas Masumoto on Food and Food Porn, Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” Rob Wilson/ Tee Kim Tong, “Jaywalking in Kaohsiung,” Snowpiercer by Bong Joon-ho, Rob Wilson, “Killer Capitalism in Snowpiercer,” Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, poems from Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, you will become familiar with some key Pacific Rim and Asia Pacific literary and cultural texts as well as the historical, social, and geopolitical contexts these texts help us to grasp. You will become familiar with a range of 20th century and postwar texts in a variety of genres: novels, essays, films, and poetry, as well as readings from cultural criticism. In this process of reading and writing in relation to these texts, you will become better able to close-read, analyze, and discuss these primary texts, recognize and interpret literary images and figurative language in relationship to the themes, contexts, and histories of these texts, and write an informed argument or creative work about a literary text or discourse in dialogue with informed colleagues.
Course Syllabus and Requirements
Apply
Contact
Lucy Lee, email: farmforchange2022@gmail.com
Instructors
Shiuhhuah Serena Chou
Associate Research Fellow at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. Her interests in scholarship include British and American environmental literature, ecocriticism, and Asian American literature. Her recent publications include “Cultivating Nature” (Cambridge, 2021), “Chinatown and Beyond: Ava Chin, Urban Foraging, and a New American Cityscape” (ISLE, 2018), “The Good Food Revolution: Will Allen and the African American Urban Farming Tradition” (Review of English and American Literature 2017), “Pruning the Past, Shaping the Future: David Masumoto and Organic Nothingness” (MELUS, 2009), and “The Secret of Shangri-la: Agricultural Travels and the Rise of Organic Farming” (Comparative Literature Studies, 2013). She is completing a book-length manuscript on organic farming and reworlding agriculture and transpacific ecopoetics, as a project in which she frames literature, writing, and critique into a knowledge-making ethos adequate to our global-local situation.
Rob Sean Wilson
Rob received a UC Berkeley doctorate in English in 1976 and was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review. He has taught in the English Department at the University of Hawai’I at Manoa and at Korea University in Seoul as Fulbright Professor and was twice a National Science Council visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. In 2001, he became a professor of transnational/ post-colonial literatures at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In the summer of 2009, he team-taught a summer seminar (with Chadwick Allen) at National Sun Yat-sen University in Taiwan on Pacific Cultural Production, counter-conversion, and the ecological framework of “Oceania.” His works include Waking In Seoul; American Sublime; Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production; Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary; Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and the New Pacific; and Reimagining the American Pacific: From ‘South Pacific’ to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics appeared with Harvard University Press in 2009 and was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Publication. An influential collection of cultural criticism from Asia/Pacific (co-edited with Christopher Connery) The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization appeared with New Pacific Press/ North Atlantic Books in 2007; and Beat Attitudes: On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists was published by New Pacific Press in 2010 and reissued with Amazon Kindle Books in 2020.