ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: The events of the past year have brought to the attention of many the importance of critiquing and dismantling multiple and intersecting forms of institutional oppression. Just as important, however, is the capacity to dream, build, and hope. But how do we do find and pursue hope in such toxic times? This interdisciplinary seminar explores the worldmaking and healing practices Asian Americans engage in with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, and media.

Description: This class introduces students to a broad survey of migratory and displacement patterns of those living in Asia as agitated by militarism, capitalism, imperialism, war, racism, sexism, classism, and nationalism stemming from within the region and abroad. What are the multiple and competing narratives of how these histories and experiences are produced? Once in the United States, how did similar—although not identical—processes of racialization, economic and labor exploitation, legislative and political exclusion, social and cultural othering, and strategies for survival and resistance work together to transform these heterogeneous populations into “Asian Americans”?

Description: In this course, we will explore the concepts and theories for analyzing the historical study and legacies of Third Worldism and its relationship to Asian America. The course begins with laying the historical foundations for the emergence of Third World solidarities in the 1960s and 1970s, before turning to the components of Third World feminisms and the movements’ contemporary legacies. The course’s final project will be to create an Instagram resource guide, as we engage critically with the possibilities and limits of social media throughout the course.

Description: This class brings contemporary Asian American, African American, Native American, and Latinx literature into relation with a focus on interracial dynamics. We will develop an analytical framework attuned to how American racial identity has been differentially and unevenly constructed through history, culture, and politics. A central goal of the course is decentering whiteness as the primary locus of literary analysis, to allow for more nuanced interpretations of topics such as U.S. imperialism, mixed race identity, activism, labor history, and immigration.

Description: In this course, we will explore the evolving ways in which the Middle East is visually represented in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present, post-9/11 era. Through discussing film, television, and photographic journalism alongside critical works of cultural analysis, we will work through how cultural objects come to function as salient social and political texts that pervade U.S. publics and how they deploy issues of race, gender and sexuality. We will begin with foundational theoretical texts that will shape our readings of representations of Southwest Asia/North Africa throughout the course. The majority of the term will then revolve around cultural objects and critical texts that shape meanings of Southwest Asia/North Africa in the United States. We will then end with a look at ways in which Southwest Asians/North Africans in the diaspora use visual culture to counter these monolithic representations.

Description: “Pleasure Activism” explores how sexuality, race, gender, class, dis/ability, and citizenship function as mutually imbricated vectors across multiple sites such as the media, the family, the school, the government, the clinic, the nightclub, and “the everyday.” This interdisciplinary course interrogates how “Asian American sexualities” are taken up as a problematic and/or analytic to discuss diaspora and migration, activism and HIV/AIDS, intimacy and pornography, gender and labor. Following the work of queer and feminist scholars of racialized sexualities who move beyond the false binaries of “good and bad” or “right and wrong,” this course asks, “What are the possibilities and potentialities of Asian American sexualities? How do Asian American sexualities inform our thinking about how we understand, relate to, and imagine the world and what we want it to be?”

Description: How can writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost to the passage of history? This class explores how literature functions as repositories of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting stories, and as imaginings of alternative histories and futures. Given the difficulty of assembling a coherent Asian American identity, our examinations will be defined as much by the absences, gaps, and contradictions of Asian America’s collective memory as by what is found within it.