ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: Remote/Synchronous. This course examines how representations of race continue to be critical to the formation of the American nation. We will look at cultural and historical texts that grapple with how “race” is used to (1) define who does and does not belong to the U.S., (2) configure feelings of longing for a homeland, and (3) resist dominant narratives of national inclusion through activism and representation.

Description: Remote/Synchronous. This is a comparative course that will examine the international migration histories of different Asian groups in the 20th century and the development of community and identity of those groups in different national contexts. We will interrogate the concept of diaspora versus migration versus immigration, and the different notions of identity implicit in each framework (diasporic community, sojourner, etc.). We will examine the immigration policies of host countries in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and the settlement histories of Asians within these countries. We will discuss notions of group belonging and ideas of citizenship, nationality and ethnicity, and also compare how different ethnic groups and different national societies have handled ethnic/racial/cultural diversity. We will, in short, be examining the crossing and construction of multiple borders, the cultural encounters and the mixings, of various Asian groups in various socioeconomic and political contexts in different nation-states.

Description: Remote/Synchronous. This class has two goals—first, providing an overview of literature written by Asian Americans in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and placing these texts in conversation with key concepts from Asian American culture and history. Second, interrogating the constructed, pan-ethnic nature of Asian American identity, a category that came into use only in the 1960s as a coalitional entity defined by shared histories of labor, discrimination, and national and cultural unbelonging.

Description: Remote/Synchronous. This course is meant to provide students with a greater understanding of Asian diasporas in the United States and strategies of activist resistance from the beginning of the twentieth century into the present. Special attention will be paid to the role of student activism—both Asian American and Asian immigrant—as well as the role of historical and ethnographic methodologies in studying such paths for change.

Description: Remote/Synchronous. Vietnamese refugees and Korean immigrants came to the United States with experiences of war that are passed to younger generations as both silence and memory. How can we understand and represent the experiences of both the older and younger generations? How do their experiences transform the history of Asian Americans as well as the broader history of the United States? What does war mean in the American experience? This research seminar focuses on Vietnamese American and Korean American communities in the Chicago area in an attempt to answer these and other questions through focused oral history research and public presentations.

Description: Remote/Synchronous. This course examines the history of US involvement in wars in Asia and the Pacific alongside Asian American cultural productions that emerged in response to colonization, militarization, internment, and migration. Our objective is to understand how theatre, performance art, spoken word, and social performances are critical storytelling practices in engaging with histories of wartime violence. The course will also explore the relationship between gender and memory, particularly how women draw on memory to make political claims and to articulate silenced histories.