First-Year Writing Seminar (101-8-28)

Topic

Okinawa: Histories, Cultures, Identities

Instructors

Laura Hein
847/491-3408
Harris Hall - Room 325
I am a professor of modern Japanese history at NU. I work on the 20th century: I’ve written two books on economic ideas and economic policy in postwar Japan (in Japanese: 理性ある人びと力ある言葉ーー大内兵衛グループと行動、東京： 岩波書店、２００７年７月) and another on how Japanese recovered from fascism (their term) now being translated by Jinbun Shoin, and edited five books that compare war remembrance in Japan, including the distinctive memories of Okinawans, to remembrance in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere. I'm just finishing up a giant multi-volume editing project. More and more, my courses are about how to get a handle on really complicated problems with no moral clarity and no easy answers.

Meeting Info

Willard Hall B72: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

Okinawa is geographically a small place with a large and multi-faceted history. Is it Chinese? Is it Japanese? Is it American? Is it independent? The answer to all these questions is Yes, Sort Of. Each of those answers opens up into a different narrative of Okinawan identity, all of which are passionately held by Okinawans today. All of them are justified primarily through appeals to Okinawan history. How do we make sense of these clashing narratives? What is at stake and why does this matter so much to so many people? This course uses these questions to teach students how specialists in several academic disciplines and the general public use historical narratives in discipline-specific ways, how to evaluate their accuracy and effectiveness, what makes them powerful, and how to construct high-quality histories themselves. The true queries of this course are: why do we want to know the answer to such questions? How do we know what we know?

Registration Requirements

First years only

Learning Objectives

** Students learn how to develop criteria to usefully analyze messy, cross-cutting, and competing historical/identity narratives
** Students will learn to recognize implied arguments in a variety of textual and visual sources. Also how to link them accurately to appropriate social-science and humanities disciplines (and emerging disciplines) and their associated topics/debates.
** Students will learn to separate out these strands and articulate them clearly orally and in writing.

Evaluation Method

four writing assignments, informed participation

Class Notes

History Major Concentration(s): Americas, Asia/Middle East
History Minor Concentration(s): United States, Asia

Class Attributes

WCAS Writing Seminar

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Weinberg First Year Seminars are only available to first-year students.