Cities and the Country

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course explores one of the most central and potent areas of cultural politics in modern China: the city and its relations to the countryside. We will explore how urban space and native soil became central places of imagination and desire in modernity; how Beijing and Shanghai become mediums of imagining differing meanings of "modernity" and "tradition," "Chinese" and "Western," and cultural authenticity; the repeated reformist and revolutionary desire to return from the city back to the countryside; as well as more recent mass migrations from the countryside during a time of (and as part of) drastic urban destruction and "renewal."