Macalester Moodle

SPAN

POLI

Centuries before the advent of industrialized travel, the Silk Roads network connected creators and consumers in lands as distant as Iceland, West Africa, and China. Medieval travelers recorded their experiences and encounters and left their legacies imprinted in archaeological records. This course invites students to read along the Silk Roads, tracing cross-cultural encounters made possible by these remarkable networks. We will read first-hand accounts of Arab travelers in medieval Russia, Mali, Somalia, and Indonesia. Moving into the Christian world, we’ll read texts like Marco Polo’s praise-filled account of the Mongolian Kublai Khan, who ruled lands from Iran to Korea. Finally, we will read Larissa Lai’s queer historic-fantasy novel When Fox is a Thousand, confronting contemporary questions about identity, diaspora, and our own histories.

The class fulfills the (1) Medieval period requirement for English major, (2) Writers of Color requirement for English major, (3) Internationalism req for the college, (4) WA req for the college.