HKU Moodle

Course Description:

What are the racialized, gendered, and cultural performances that shape historical memory, structures, and societies? This course asks what it means to perform the past. Students will explore a broad range of performances including films, theater, dance, and everyday happenings, culminating in an oral history project.

The course examines the development of the Philippine society from its precolonial beginnings and the onset of Spanish colonization (mid-1500s) to the second EDSA People Power Revolution in 2002. By situating the Philippines within the connections and movements of Asia and the trans-Pacific world, this course investigates the Philippine culture and society as a product of internal and external contexts, contestations, and transformations. 

The course surveys the history of Germany’s first republic, named after the national assembly that convened in Weimar in 1919 and drew up a new constitution after the German Empire had been defeated at the end of the First World War. The Weimar Republic was influenced by changing parliamentary majorities, but democracy was working. The ensuing economic recovery led to political pacification. With regard to the arts, science, and culture, some sections of the German people were for a short time able to refer to the “golden Twenties”. It was a period characterised by an intense but brief flowering, since the fall of the Republic could already be foreseen in the great global economic crisis of 1929. As a result of the crisis, Hitler’s National Socialist movement became the strongest political force in Germany. However, the turbulent fourteen years of the Weimar Republic were not only a desperate and grudging experiment in democracy but also offered a panoply of worldwide recognised political, economic, social, and cultural models, some of which blended imperceptibly into the Nazi ideology, while others survived until nowadays.

This course traces the rise and fall of the German Empire from its inception after the Franco-German War of 1870/71 to its demise, in defeat and revolution, in 1918. It examines crucial moments in the evolution of high politics, economy and society, and the actors explaining their meaning and significance for Germany, Europe, and the world. Figures such as the Empire’s founder Bismarck, the three emperors Wilhelm I, Friedrich III, and Wilhelm II, the imperial chancellors, and the militaries will be studied, and major ideologies such as conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and imperialism will be examined. A global and transnational perspective will be employed when studying the forces of unification, industrialisation, colonisation, and militarisation as they combined to propel the German Empire from new nation to European major power which found itself militarily defeated at the end of the First World War.

This course examines Qing China’s frontier, maritime, and diplomatic relations from the beginning

to the end of the dynasty (1644-1912). It addresses both the Qing’s conventionally-understood role

as a successor state to the Ming, as well as its often lesser-understood role as a conquest empire in its

own right—one that drew on institutions and traditions both inherited and invented in its varied

interactions with “China and non-China” 中外. In the first half of the course, students will explore

the formation and expansion of this multivalent empire; in the second half, students will explore the

challenges that this empire faced in a rapidly changing global political and economic environment.