ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: Small, cute, quiet? Asian American girls are made, not born. From The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Belly Conklin to Mitski, Asian American girls and women are ironically gaining representational visibility in the same historical moment of the Atlanta shootings and a wave of anti-Asian violence. Taking this disjunction as its entry point, this class will explore theories of race, gender, and sexuality through an intersectional approach centered on Asian American girls as subjects worthy of study. We will situate their figuration within histories of immigration, imperialism, and racialization in the United States and Asia. This course will also introduce students to best practices for reading and writing in the humanities, such as close reading, argumentative writing, and public media creation.

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 examine the structural and institutional contexts in which cultural production occurs, and how audiences receive, resist, and reframe these narratives. 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.

Description: What is education for? Who should it serve? Who decides? This class focuses on the political and legal contention in U.S. education, with a special focus on the Supreme Court decisions Brown and SFFA.

Description: Framing Asian Americans as “model minorities” has long obscured the issues Asian American communities face. In this course, we examine the contradictions and convergences around forming “Asian American community,” including the debates around and opportunities for solidarity relating to immigration, labor, mental health, education, information flows, transnationalism, environmental racism, and displacement. Focusing on the Chicagoland context, we ask about the role of space and place in shaping Asian American communities. Students will co-construct knowledge by learning with and from local Asian American communities.

Description: Asian American, Asian-American, Asian/American: from Chinese Americans to Hmong Americans to mixed race Asian Americans, from fourth-generation Californians to cosmopolitan college students, from desert internment camps to New York City office buildings, what do the many subjects and locations of Asian American literature tell us about the capaciousness of the category itself? 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: This course examines Asian America through the lens of space, place, and the built environment. We consider how displacement, migration, and settlement patterns have shaped Asian American urban/suburban and transnational/diasporic landscapes, and how they map onto affective and imagined geographies. From signage to mapping to malls, we explore “Asian American spaces” as sites of memory, contestation, and placemaking. We ground ourselves in the local context, partnering with Evanston ASPA on a quarter-long project.

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, women\'s organizations and leisure, and resistance and activism. We will discuss how these historical experiences shaped the development of Asian American female subjectivities and feminisms.

Description: “Queer and Trans Ethnic Studies” introduces students to a broad survey of historical and contemporary racial and sexual discourses shaping communities as produced by and producing unequal power relations across geographic sites, social networks, and strategic alliances. By focusing upon social inequalities generated from various social structures: the government, the school, the prison, the media, and the hospital, this class explores how webs of power both indirectly and directly inform our everyday lives. How do critical race, feminist, and queer analyses of these institutions highlight areas of oppression and opportunities for resistance across shifting hierarchies of race, sexuality, gender, class, nationality, and ability? How have various queer and trans of color communities and populations been affected by historical, economic, political, social, cultural, and environmental changes and what strategies and tactics have they pursued in the quest for intersectional social justice?

Description: What happens when you juxtapose the constantly shifting marker of “Filipinx American” with the highly contested concepts of “literature,” “art,” and “culture?”What makes something “critical?” Instead of viewing these terms as predetermined givens to be represented or maintained, this class takes these terms as conditions of possibility for cultural productions and aesthetic expressions by self-identified Filipinx Americans, or what cultural critic Lucy Burns recognizes as “puro arte,” and admiration of the theatrics and labor of artful expression. Rather than beginning with the question of “What does it mean to be Filipinx American?,” in this class we will ask, “What do Filipinx Americans do? What do Filipinx Americans make?” This class introduces students to a broad survey of stories, plays, performances, films, music, and visual art by rebels, queers, misfits, outlaws, punks, nonconformists, “deviants,” and other similar figures who find power and pleasure as outcasts.

Description: This course will examine artists and art works across the Pacific that deal with topics of diaspora, displacement, excavation, and ceremony. We will examine contemporary art by islands-based artists and diasporic artists that spell out a uniquely transpacific world (this class will focus on Jeju and Okinawa). When does artwork become more than “art” for these artists and the audience? How do artworks celebrate, protest, and mourn for past tragedies and the remains, objects, sites, and places of ancestors? No prior knowledge of the areas or language skills is necessary, but all are welcome to contribute their knowledge.

Description: 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 ethnic identity of those groups in different national contexts. We will interrogate the concept of diaspora versus migration versus immigration, and the notions of identity and community implicit in each framework. 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: This course introduces students to both historical and contemporary representations and expressions of Asian Americans in mainstream, independent, and alternative models of media. Such sites of production and reception include: documentaries, narrative film, television, print media, music, social media, literature/memoirs, video games, and more. A central focus of this course will be the various tensions that emerge vis-à-vis multiple and competing interpretations about the meanings, purposes, and affects of media for/in/about Asian Americans. Students will engage the power, pain, and pleasure of race, gender, sexuality, class, immigration, nationalism, health, and other topics through/within the multiple mediascapes of Asian America.

Description: Far from apolitical, histories of science in the United States have been deeply shaped by structures of racism—such as slavery, settler colonialism, immigration, militarism, policing, and more. This course examines how racism has persisted across scientific fields and how technology has been used to advance systems of discrimination, from medical and biological sciences to chemistry, physics, and computing. Along the way, the course will explore justice-oriented technological approaches developed by activists that offer new ways of envisioning the relationship between science, technology, and the social world.

Description: Twice since 9/11, politicians have referred to the World War II imprisonment of Japanese Americans as a possible precedent for policies toward Muslims. Yet many Americans remain ignorant about this important and understudied episode in U.S. history. This seminar-style course examines events leading up to the mass imprisonment of a group of people based on race, the role played by wartime emergency language, the experiences of Japanese Americans, and the consequences of this wartime policy. It focuses on the intersections between race, gender, nation, and law. Readings include secondary and primary sources, including related court cases, executive orders, documentary films, memoirs, and fiction.

Description: In this course, students will explore how, as the United States empire expanded, powerful elites and politicians decided what kind of people could be part of the polity and on what terms. Students will learn the history of U.S. citizenship law, why certain people were eligible for U.S. citizenship, and why some territories became independent, others became states, and still others remained colonies. This course puts the histories of U.S. territorial acquisition in North America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific in conversation with one another. By paying attention to how the United States constructed race in different times and for different populations, students are encouraged to see commonalities in the classification and treatment of Asian (American), Latin American (and LatinX) and Indigenous peoples. As a whole, the course will demonstrate how U.S. elites and state actors repeatedly invested in and defended the idea of the United States as a white nation.

Description: Since 1942, the United States has been engaged in permanent war – from World War II and the Cold War to the ongoing War on Terror. We will explore how this society emerged from complex entanglements between racism, militarism, capitalism, and empire: the military-industrial complex. Through historical, cultural, and social analysis, we will examine how war is waged in our everyday lives: in our workplaces, classrooms, laboratories, and local communities. And along the way, we will learn from anti-war movements driven by visions for more just and decolonial worlds.

Description: In this course, we use food to illuminate histories of migration, colonization, and empire, and discuss food’s entanglement with capitalism, politics, and (gendered) labor. We ask how the production, representation, and consumption of food have become contested sites of racialization, resistance, and the negotiation of boundaries around difference. Through media texts and experiential learning, we consider Asian American foodways as a space to examine multiplicity, authenticity, and hybridity. We place Asian American food in the local context, through exploration of Chicagoland space and place-making. There will be at least one mandatory off-campus trip.

Description: How are digital spaces shaping – and shaped by – Asian American identities, communities, movements, and experiences? In this class, we explore the intersection of race and technology, labor and (im)migration, and our relationship to screens, code, and algorithms. We ask how surveillance, weaponization of data, the politics and circulation of (mis/dis)information, and resistance informs Asian American digital cultures. From hashtag activism to digital intimacy, we examine cultural production on social media platforms, dating apps, and viral videos and memes. Students will engage in a quarter-long digital ethnography project.

Description: Although the Midwest is imagined as the white heartland of America, Asian Americans and other racialized minorities have a long history in the region. This upper-level undergraduate seminar course posits an Asian American Midwest through memoirs, documentaries, oral histories, and primary sources documenting the experiences of Asian Americans in the region. The course will ask students to consider what differentiates Asian American histories and experiences in the Midwest from other regions and how an Asian American Midwest might be defined.

Description: Kim Jong Un bans mullets and skinny jeans. North Korea is a nuclear weapons nightmare. These ripped-from-the-headlines statements are part of popular ‘Western’ conceptions of the DPRK as dangerous, unknowable, and absurd. In this course, we ask how the production of knowledge, expertise, and media shape dominant representations of North Korea, and how these images circulate in ‘Western’ discourse about the country – in news, popular culture, and digital spaces. By critically examining our ways of knowing, we explore the construction, circulation, interpretation, and contestation of ‘Western’ knowledge about North Korea.

Description: As a bookend to an "introductory" course, the capstone seminar allows Asian American Studies majors, minors, and graduate students to examine-at an advanced level- emerging shifts, trends, and provocations in contemporary scholarship to dabble in the politics of knowledge production within this interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field. Students will integrate theories and methods from the course with their intellectual interests and community commitments to develop a culminating research, creative, or praxis-based project. Potential topics, guest speakers, field trips, and films may address Asian Americans and: electoral politics, queerness, transpacific studies, the law, inter and intra race relations, transnational activism, health/wellness/disability, film and media, education, and more. I also welcome other advanced students doing thesis/capstone projects related to Ethnic/Gender/American/Queer/Sexuality/Disability Studies.