ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: What are the histories and experiences of Asian Americans, and what is their relationship to power and agency—or the ability to make decisions about our lives? Asian Americans often experience invisibility and marginality while being folded into a Black/White racial binary. Who and what is “Asian America” and what is our relationship to race, power, and other racialized communities? Through a multimedia approach, we privilege the voices of Asian Americans to uncover their perspectives on the central debates of our time including immigration and citizenship; race, racism, and coalitions; and exclusion and belonging.

Description: Is American Justice (color)blind? This interdisciplinary upper-division course examines the histories, institutions, and policies that shape broad scale systems of racialization, incarceration, and citizenship. Drawing from legal studies, first-person narratives, theories of race and other approaches, this class analyzes the ideas and practices that shape the relationships between individuals, groups, and systems of power. How do we understand different groups' experiences with crime and punishment? How does race, citizenship status, and religion affect these relations? We analyze how people negotiate institutions like the prison and the US-Mexico border, and the relationships between individual choice and broader structures. By understanding the ways that three particular groups—African Americans, Mexicans, and Middle Easterners—are differentially racialized and criminalized, we will address the concept of "blind justice."

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: From karaoke bars to military bases, and from local dungeons to worldwide webcams, the landscapes of intimacy and labor are deeply interconnected. This upper-division seminar explores how these spaces—alongside international borders and digital networks—are woven together by power, control, and profit. Central to our inquiry is how Asian/Americans have navigated and negotiated these terrains, often becoming il/legible (both visible and invisible) to the state and the public eye. We will approach sex work through the lens of labor rights and political economy, moving beyond binary moral debates of "right vs. wrong" to examine how power, law, and resistance operate in the lives of Asian/American workers.

Description: How are bodies racialized through performance? How does performance illuminate how bodies acquire cultural meaning? What does it mean for a body to be marked Asian or Black? What kinds of political and cultural connections are shared by Asian Americans and Black Americans? This course examines performances by and about Asian Americans and Black Americans in order to understand an interconnected history of race and racism in the United States from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. We will explore the production and contestation of racialized meanings—how bodies are marked and redefined as “Asian,” “oriental,” “Black,” “other,” “Asian American,” and “Black American.” In other words, we will study the construction of race through performance on stage and in everyday life. The course covers a range of performances or embodied practices, including museum and fair displays, exhibitions, minstrelsy, cabaret performances, theatre, martial arts, hip hop, and activism.