Intermediate Burmese 100A and 100B introduce students to progressively difficult authentic text and multimedia, comprising excerpts from contemporary short stories and poetry, news reports, song lyrics, and TV adverts.

Together we will read and view a variety of stories—told primarily in the form of prose fiction, poetry, essays, films and other visual art—by Vietnamese and overseas Vietnamese writers and artists who explore the consequences of colonialism, war, migration and resettlement for individuals, families and communities using vastly different aesthetic techniques and registering multiple social, cultural, political and personal concerns.

Can a song inspire a revolution? The course focuses on literary, visual, and performance texts that participated in political discourses in the Philippines. What strategies did the writers and artists employ? How did writers and artists face issues of censorship and persecution? How did social movements influence these texts, and in turn, how did these texts contribute to these social movements?

Virtual Study Abroad: http://studyabroad.berkeley.edu/program/summerabroad/manilla-virtual

The course brings students on a research trip to the Philippines to learn through interviews and interactions with Filipino people, selected lectures by the Philippines’ leading scholars and interactive activities with the Philippines’ artists and writers.

We will be reading Philippine myths, legends, indigenous poetry and epics. This includes traditional narrative forms such as the alamat (legends) and the kuwentong-bayan (folktales) and poetic forms such as the ambahan, diona, and tanaga. Among the questions the course explores are: How can we understand the way of life and belief systems of the ethnolinguistic groups of the Philippines through their literatures? How do the dynamics between orality and literacy come into play in these Filipino literary texts?

This seminar will focus on problems and dilemmas of contemporary society as they transpire in recent Indian films and TV shows. TV shows will be of special interest to us as a medium that often escapes scholarly attention due to its perceived low content quality and artistic value. However, crime shows, soap operas or sitcoms can serve as valuable sources of information, as they either inadvertently show societal norms, stereotypes, and normative behavior without any restraints, or intentionally openly depict current ideological conflicts and burning social issues.

This reading and discussion course is an overview of Philippine history from the 16th century until the present. Works covered include both classics and the latest scholarship.