ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: We will explore one of the most enduring and flexible genres in American popular culture – film and literary noir. Film noir, or “black film,” and its literary corollary, the hard boiled crime fiction, is distinguished by a style and theme that focuses on blackened frames and darkened lives. The genre plays with tropes of light and dark in order to demonstrate how people become “black” because of their immoral behavior. And yet the specifically racial overtones of noir has not been explored by critics. In this course we will consider how racial difference plays a constitutive role in the American imaginary and suffuses one of the most popular genres in American culture. And in doing so, we will also explore some of the most enduring themes in American culture: lust, sin, crime, greed and regret in the multiracial city.

Description: This course provides a historical, thematic, and contemporary analysis of the lives of South Asians in America, or desis. South Asian Americans include people from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Burma and their U.S.-born children. What are the experiences of desis, and what have been their primary concerns? We will first review the immigration histories of South Asians to the U.S., analyzing how desis’ lives, including their immigration, settlement patterns, marriage, occupations, and racial status, have been impacted by U.S. law. Turning to contemporary experiences, we focus on the rise of second and third generation desi youth. In this section, we cover topics including: negotiating family expectations of gender, sexual, marital, economic, and career goals; desi musical subcultures of bhangra and hip hop; inter-racial relations; and their political worldviews and activism. Throughout, we will evaluate popular depictions and scholarly theories of South Asians through the lenses of assimilation and cultural retention and characterizations of desis as model minorities, hybrid beings, and as American, ethnic, and racial beings. Are these accurate depictions? We conclude by considering the impact of 9/11 and the future concerns of South Asians in the U.S.

Description: This course examines literature, film, and critical theory created by Asian Americans in order to examine the development of “Asian America” as a literary field. We will explore how Asian American literature and theory engages themes and questions in literary studies, particularly related to questions of race, nation and empire, such as sentimentalism, the autobiography, buildungsroman and genre studies. For example, how does Carlos Bulosan draw on tropes and images of 1930’s American depression to draw equivalence between Filipino colonial subjects and domestic migrant workers? How does Siu Sin Far use sentimentalism as a strategy to evoke empathy for her mixed race protagonists? How does Hirahara manipulate conventions of literary noir to contest dominant recollections of WWII? Thus we are also learning to ‘deconstruct’ the text and understand how Asian American literature and culture offers a parallax view into American history, culture and political-economy. Starting from the premise that Asian America operate as a contested category of ethnic and national identity we will consider how Asian American literatures and cultures “defamiliarize” American exceptionalist claims to pluralism, modernity, and progress. The novels, short stories, plays and films we will study in this class chart an ongoing movement in Asian American studies from negotiating the demands for domesticated narratives of immigrant assimilation to crafting new modes of critique highlighting Asian America’s transnational and postcolonial history and poesis.

Description: This course will examine ethnographic approaches to language use among Asian communities in the United States. Focusing on both “heritage languages” (mother tongues) as well as varieties of English, we will explore topics of language socialization, bilingualism, code-switching, language retention and loss, style, stereotypes, the social dynamics of English as a Second Language, and slang. Connections between these topics and broader dynamics of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality will be made. Special attention will be paid to processes of racial and ethnic formation through language ideologies and use, especially in the context of English monolingualism, the model minority stereotype, and the white public sphere.

Description: This seminar takes up “race war” as an analytical concept for thinking about the question of empire in U.S. culture. From the conquest of native peoples across the American continent to the Spanish American War, from World War II to the U.S. War in Vietnam, from the Cold War to the “war on terror”—wars have been waged not only in the name of territorial acquisition and diplomacy, but have also profoundly shaped ideas about race and nation in U.S. society. We therefore approach the study of race beyond U.S. borders, using interdisciplinary methods to interrogate its formation in transnational and imperial contexts. How have racial ideologies worked to rationalize U.S. conquest, “pacification,” and occupation overseas? In turn, how have these processes reinforced and reified racial concepts, representations, and practices in the United States? In examining these questions, we will pay attention to how historically marginalized subjects have responded to wars, from proclaiming their loyalty and patriotism to engaging in more critical acts of protests, within and beyond the United States.

Description: Current scholarly work on globalization, particularly in the area of same-sex desire in non-western locations, is struggling to understand local appropriations of seemingly western signs—like gay and lesbian rights and identity politics—in the context of increasingly expanding transnational communication, late-capitalist flow of commodities and people, and economic development. Some have argued that sexuality is now globalized, construing categories like gay and lesbian as universals that travel across space and time. In these approaches, what is seen to be happening is the importation of western cultural practices to non-western places, where local cultures, seen as traditional, authentic, and in many cases, pre-modern, are recipients of the spread of western cultures. The West is thereby equated with the global, and local gay and lesbian scenes and practices are interpreted as copies of “real” non-heterosexual identities. In this course, we will analyze the term globalization and the idea of a “global gay” culture. We will then consider some critiques of queer theory, examining its lack of a wider social and economic perspective and of the material and social components of sexualities, its relationship to a Euro-American rights-based discourse of sexual difference, and a post- modernist approach to sexuality. Ethnographic investigations and popular productions of same-sex cultures outside the West will also be examined. Special emphasis will be placed on the studies and representations of non-heterosexuality in Thailand.

Description: This course examines the history of U.S. involvement in wars in Asia and the Pacific alongside Asian American cultural productions, which emerged in response to colonization, militarization, internment, migration and displacement. Our objective is to understand how theatre, performance art, spoken word and social performances (for example, pilgrimages by adoptees and family history projects) in particular are significant sites and critical practices in contesting these histories of imperialism. We will have a particular focus on the relation of gender and memory, particularly how women employ memory to make political claims and to articulate histories of violence that have long been silenced. Our investigations will be guided by these inquiries: How do migrants and displaced people construct, inhabit and reproduce memories of war through cultural productions? How have embodied Asian American cultural expressions served as a site to counter the familial, cultural and historical amnesia that surround traumas of war? We will read key works in Asian American history and cultural studies, along with critical readings from (post)colonial, trauma, feminist and performance studies. Previous knowledge of Asian American performance is not necessary.

Description: What is Asian American advertising, and how can we understand cultural production and consumption practices among Asian Americans? This course will examine ethnographic approaches to such questions for Asian communities in the United States. We will examine the production of advertising for specific Asian ethnic groups. We will also look at other cultural productions, such as fashion, where advertising plays a key role. Second, we will look at studies documenting Asian Americans’ roles in popular culture and commodities. Finally, the course will compare advertising and consumption in the US with China, India, Japan, and other Asian nation-states.

Description: This course is an introduction to the history of Asian immigrants and Asian Americans in the United States. We will examine the experiences of these two groups from a historically-grounded, interdisciplinary perspective within the international context of diaspora and labor migration and the domestic context of race relations, nation-building and U.S. prominence as a world power. Reaching back to the earliest encounters of Asians with the Americas, we will discuss how European imperialism and American expansionism shaped those encounters into a history that has parallels to the forced migration of Africans as slaves. We will also examine the ways in which images such as the Yellow Peril and the Model Minority have concrete impact on Asians in the U.S., and explore their significance in American discourse on race.

Description: This course offers an examination of Black and Asian race relations in the U.S. Topics range from the racialization and sexualization of Blacks and Asians to international “Afro-Asian” connections. We then focus on WWII and the post-war economy and the resulting racial and economic dynamics for Blacks and Asians. We then examine the rise of racial consciousness in the sixties, moving beyond Black and White to reconceptualize inter-minority relations. Following a section on the Third World internationalism of Black and Asian leaders (e.g., W.E.B. du Bois and Mao Tse-tung) and overlapping Black and Asian movements, we analyze stereotypes used to pit Asians and Blacks against one another. We conclude the quarter with a section on Islam, race and rap and discuss the futures of Asian and Black relations in the U.S.

Description: “The American Century” is a term popularized by Life editor Henry Luce and describes what he imagined as the utopic potential of an American global leadership made necessary by the decline of European empires across the world after WWII. In this interdisciplinary class we will study the history and representations of the U.S. in Asia to map the tight connections wrought between these two spaces in constituting the American Century. We will also develop “intimacy” as an analytic to understand how wartime relations and post-war development projects rearrange domestic and gender practices as well as national culture, politics and economy. Topics will range from war brides to transnational adoption to the role of Christian missions.

Description: This course will examine the cross-cultural work of Asian American artists with a focus on the Chicago area along with the influence of national movements. The main focus of the study will be the phenomenal development in the last 10 years as the Chicago area marks significant contribution to new music and performing arts. Themes that will be addressed are the forming of new cultural and artistic communities and their impact on the mainstream culture, collaboration between communities and cultures on local and transnational levels, culture, and the art society’s community and economic development issues.

Description: The Asian American movement of the late 1960s occupies a pivotal place in the history of Asian American cultural politics. Yet this movement did not occur in a vacuum. In this class, we will situate this movement within a longer history of Asian American activism, from the late nineteenth century to the present. From the labor organizing of early migrant workers to the multifaceted struggles of the contemporary moment, Asian Americans have contested their social, political, and economic marginalization by utilizing the courts, demonstrating in public spaces, and engaging a range of cultural practices. How have political affinities forged with African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans in the United States—and with Asian peoples abroad—empowered Asian Americans in their struggles for justice? How have these cross-racial and transnational movements reinforced or challenged conceptions of justice rooted in U.S. American liberal ideals? We will examine topics such as immigration reform, antiwar and anticolonial movements, draft resistance, Japanese American redress, hate crimes, racial profiling, and affirmative action.

Description: This course explores the intersections of gender, race, and ethnicity in the historical experiences of Asian American women. We will consider a variety of themes significant to those experiences, including immigration and citizenship, exclusion and discrimination, family and community structures, paid and unpaid labor, and resistance and activism. We will discuss how these historical experiences shaped the development of Asian American female subjectivities and feminisms..

Description: The course provides a critical examination of post-1965 Asian American communities in light of the demographic, social, racial and economic trends in both the United States and Asia today. In particular, the course will focus on key themes such as the model minority, immigration, mental health, family, education, and religion. An important objective of this course is raising students’ awareness of and responsibility to the needs of Asian American communities.

Description: There is no singular “Chinese Americans experience.” This lecture/discussion course strives to introduce students to the multiple, varied, but overlapping experiences of people of Chinese heritage in the United States. Chinese have usually been relegated to the margins of American history, but this course will put them at the center in order to reveal how major events in American history affected the lives of Chinese Americans and how Chinese Americans played important roles in shaping those events. We will address the process of migration and settlement that brought Chinese to America and the economic, political, religious, and colonial contexts of this movement. We will also consider the racialization of Chinese in America; in other words, how other Americans came to view the Chinese race and how Chinese themselves understood their racial status in America. We will examine canonical Chinese American moments and places (like the California Gold Rush, San Francisco Chinatown, the Transcontinental Railroad) but also look for Chinese where they are unexpected (like colonial America, the 1950s South, the Civil Rights Movement). Students will engage a wide variety of primary sources, including memoirs, fiction, political cartoons, government documents, oral histories, and films.

Description: The Korean War is iconic in both Korean and Korean American history. This course examines the social and cultural legacies of the Korean War for Korean Americans. We start with the war itself and move on to discuss the three major types of migration the war initiated, military brides, adoptees and refuge migrants. Then we discuss how the war is remembered and mis-remembered, and portrayed in films and literature, and what that has meant for Korean American identity.

Description: Arts in Practice is a survey and research based class structure. This course will examine the cross-cultural work of Asian American artists with a focus on the Chicago area along with the influence of national movement. The main focus of the study will be the phenomenal development in the last 10 years as the Chicago area (but not limited to) marks significant contribution for the new music and performing arts. Also, many of influential cyber arts and/or non-arts movement such as Youtube submissions, Internet-based performing activities and web page presentations will be investigated. Themes that will be addressed are the forming of new cultural and artistic communities and their impact on the mainstream culture, collaboration between communities and cultures on local and transnational levels, culture, community and economic development issues in the arts and society.