ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: This course introduces students to Asian American comics and graphic narratives. How do these texts define what it means to be Asian in America, and what counts as Asian American literature? How do they graphically capture the unique position of Asian Americans as both racially hyper-visible and socially invisible? Readings will include comics by authors such as Gene Yang, Mira Jacob, Adrian Tomine, and G.B. Tran.

Description: Education, despite being touted as a great equalizer, is a highly contested site of struggle. It is a struggle to get in, a struggle to get through, and a struggle to figure out what happens after. Throughout each of these time periods academic and journalistic coverage of the Asian American student experience argue that social, cultural, political, economic, and familial pressures converge and compound on this population leading to unfulfilling, unpleasant, and unbelievable outcomes. Following that claim, this course explores three interlinked and overlapping themes for the quarter: 1) The persistence of the model minority myth and its impact on higher education policy, 2) parent and teacher expectations of Asian American students in K-12 and university settings, and 3) Asian American student mental health and well-being. We will study student activism and the emergence of Ethnic Studies/Asian American Studies in higher education,explore contemporary intersectional Asian American student experiences, and critically examine the politics of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” rhetoric. In what ways do Asian American students survive, negotiate, and resist external and internal pressures of success and excellence? How do Asian Americans begin to redefine success on their own terms? Texts for this course may include erin Ninh’s Passing for Perfect; Christine Yano, Neal Akatsuka, and the Asian American Collective’s Straight A’s: Asian American College Students in Their Own Words, and Debbie Lum’s documentary Try Harder!

Description: ​​How are our everyday interactions with media and culture shaping – and shaped by – our identities? In this class, we critically explore the relationship between power, ideology, and cultural narratives in mass media and everyday life. We consider the structural and institutional contexts in which these narratives develop, and how media often mirror and reinforce existing inequity. Through the lens of various intersecting social categories, such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and religion, we examine media representations of identities, communities, and solidarities, and how audiences receive, resist, and reframe these narratives. Collectively, we trace “Asian American narratives” through present-day cultural forms, such as true crime documentaries, reality TV, political advertising, and our own social media feeds. This course provides students with the theoretical tools to develop critical media literacy.

Description: What is the role of race in the newsroom? How does (and how should) a journalist’s positionality influence their coverage? Do diverse newsrooms produce diverse content? In this class, we critically examine the values and norms driving Anglo-Western journalism, such as objectivity, fairness, and truth. We explore the practice and routinization of these values, the role of imagined audiences in news production, and the influence of circulation on who and how people interact with news. Along the way, we pay careful attention to power and equity in journalism labor, including the affective labor of journalists of color in mainstream and ethnic media, transnational identities in foreign correspondence, and the complex relationship between representation and community. Students will apply their learning to their own news consumption habits and engage in a solutions-oriented journalism project.

Description: Introduces students to the history and culture of Asian America from the late 19th century to the present. We will examine a broad range of media forms produced by and about Asian Americans, including court documents, literature, photographs and film, social media, and oral histories. Students will learn how the term “Asian American” emerged as a radical sign of 1960s political solidarity — to replace the term “Oriental” and to transcend individual ethnic designations like “Chinese American” or “Indian American” – and how that solidarity has been mobilized and challenged through contemporary contexts such as 9/11, COVID, affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, and the rise of China.

Description: Asian Americans have long been stereotyped as apolitical and as the ‘forever foreigner,’ unable to navigate the U.S. political system. This course examines the socially constructed nature of ‘Asian American’ as a political label. How have politicians navigated this identity — in relation to public opinion, voting behavior, stereotypes, partisan discourse, and self-presentation? What about activism and resistance outside of the dominant political structure? Throughout the course, we will trace the political lives of Asian Americans who have chosen differing paths in relation to the existing U.S. political structure.

Description: This course examines Asian American advertising and consumption by focusing on concepts of racial capitalism, authenticity, and appropriation. We will examine case studies from advertising, food, fashion, and other cultural forms among Asian American communities as well as their uptake and circulation in the broader U.S. population. Students should be willing to delve into complex social science readings about semiotics, theories of power, and paradigms of racialization.

Description: From karaoke bars to military bases, from local dungeons to worldwide webcams, from sites of grassroots organization to spaces of neoliberal legislation, between international borders and across electronically mediated networks, how are these institutions, spaces, subjects, and normalized practices interconnected through a web of power, control, and profit and how have Asian Americans navigated and negotiated these terrains? Students will read an array of texts written by and/or relating to Asian/American sex workers, including: historical and contemporary legislation, selections from ethnographic studies of sex work in Asia and the United States, as well as first- hand accounts of Asian/American sex workers who make a living by teaching/ practicing BDSM, shooting mainstream and internet pornography, supplying consensual sexual services, organizing for sex worker rights and the decriminalization of sex work, and more. Students should be prepared to engage with texts, films, and speakers covering a spectrum of experiences/intensities emerging from this course’s capacious approach to the concept of “sex work.”

Description: The United States is set to become a majority minority country by 2045. What are the many promises—and what are the many pitfalls—of interracial encounters, and what do they reveal about the country writ large? How do minority writers understand and narrate each other? This class brings contemporary African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American literature into relation with a focus on interracial dynamics. By examining complex topics from Black/Asian conflict during the 1992 LA Riots to the shared border migrations of indigenous and Latinx subjects, 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. In the process, we will familiarize ourselves with the richness and diversity of multiethnic American literature by considering a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, and film.

Description: The United States is set to become a majority minority country by 2045. What are the many promises—and what are the many pitfalls—of interracial encounters, and what do they reveal about the country writ large? How do minority writers understand and narrate each other? This class brings contemporary African American, Native American, Latinx, and Asian American literature into relation with a focus on interracial dynamics. By examining complex topics from Black/Asian conflict during the 1992 LA Riots to the shared border migrations of indigenous and Latinx subjects, 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. In the process, we will familiarize ourselves with the richness and diversity of multiethnic American literature by considering a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, and film.

Description: Race is socially constructed—but how is it medically constructed? This seminar surveys Black, Latinx, Asian,and Indigenous American literary and cultural production to question how “healthy” bodies in the United States are constituted, and in turn, what these racialized processes reveal about the essential role of race in producing a body politic. Concomitantly, we will also read scholarship from ethnic studies that charts racialized comorbidities, pre-existing conditions, and environmental racism, as well as work that expands our understanding of race’s imbrications with medical paradigms such as eugenics, genetics, informed consent, reproductive rights, disability, mental illness, and, of course, pandemics. In addition to excavating the long histories and present problems surrounding medical racism, another goal of this course is tracking the medicalization of race itself. As such, we will challenge commonly held perceptions of bodies, pain, ability, and the constitution of equitable futures. We will also supplement our reading with guest lectures from medical professionals working at the intersection of race and medicine.Students will take away from the class a deeper grasp of the discourse surrounding race and medicine, as well as how to deploy this knowledge in their critical interpretations of cultural production. Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do texts by writers of color challenge normative assessments of what constitutes health and wellness? How do we ethically consider race and medicine without resorting to postracial idealism? And to what extent can creative experiments generated in art and literature re-envision the medicalized terms under which race is understood?