Towards a Syllabus on Asian Religions in America
While everyone else I know in academia is wrapping up the semester and stuck in various circles of grading hell, I am looking ahead toward the fall semester. That is because I recently received an email reminding me that my book list for my fall classes was due soon. So, yesterday I began sketching out the basic outline for my upper level seminar on Asian Religions in America that I'll be teaching down at the University of Alabama in the fall. What I have so far is a very broad outline of what I want to cover with some books plugged in:
I. Early Encounters
Lola Williamson, Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion
Michael J. Altman, Imagining Hindus: India and Religion in Nineteenth Century America (manuscript)
Thomas A. Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912
II. World's Parliament of Religions
Richard Hughes Seager, The World's Parliament of Religion: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893
III. The 20th Century: Immigration, Conversion, and Americanization
Richard Hughes Seager, Buddhism in America
Vasudha Narayanan, "Hinduism in America" in The Cambridge History of Religions in America, Vol. III 1945-Present, Stephen J. Stein ed.
Vasudha
Narayanan, "Hinduism in Pittsburgh: Creating the South Indian "Hindu"
Experience in the United States" and Sitansu S. Chakravarti "A Diasporic
Hindu Creed: Some Basic Features of Hinduism" in The Life of Hinduism, John Stratton Hawley ed.
Lola Williamson, Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion
Jeff Wilson, Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South
IV. American Popular Culture
Jane Naomi Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture
We'll use Tom Tweed and Stephen Prothero's Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History throughout the semester to supplement the secondary readings.
We will also watch the film, Kumare, discussed in this INKtalk:
As you can see, the course is focused on Hinduism and Buddhism. I've chosen this narrow focus so we can trace the history of these two traditions from the nineteenth century forward and because they are the two I have the most training in myself. And, yes, I put my own manuscript on the syllabus. So, dear RiAH readers, what are your thoughts? What books I should add or remove or replace? Is there a giant gaping hole in my outline? Do you have tips for teaching this sort of upper level seminar?
I'll report back with the final syllabus near the end of the summer.
Comments
David
I also ask this because I'm thinking of work that introduces women and gender through the missionary experience -- Amanda Porterfield has a chapter on India and Hindu reform in Mary Lyon and the Mount Holyoke Missionaries, and there's that chapter in Sklar and Ellington's Competing Kingdoms that takes some of these themes into the early 20th century.
I look forward to your reports back on the course.