ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: In what ways do Asian/American students survive, negotiate, and resist external and internal pressures of success and excellence? What happens when “the dream” is achieved but happiness doesn’t follow? How do Asian/Americans begin to redefine success on their own terms? 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.

Description: Are you interested in organizing and advocacy work? Do you want to put theories and knowledge from the classroom into practice? Have you been wondering how to build resilient movements, sustain your involvement, and engage across conflict without burning out? This immersive course relies on organizing frameworks and case studies from Asian American Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies to guide students as they move from theory to praxis. By exploring what organizers and advocates have done historically – such as the 1995 Hunger Strike that led to the creation of the Asian American Studies Program at Northwestern – and the ongoing work of organizations in Evanston, Chicago, and beyond, students will learn about and practice skills and strategies for building and sustaining their own advocacy practice. Students will partner with a community-based organization and gain hands-on experience working with seasoned organizers and advocates on a project, such as advocating for fair housing, coalitional organizing for a community benefits agreement, and raising awareness of gender-based violence. Students are expected to attend at least one off-campus excursion (on a Friday)

Description: How does legal status shape the lives of the 11 million Americans who are undocumented? This course develops the necessary historical context, as well as the conceptual tools to make sense of why people migrate, what shapes their incorporation, how does legal status intersect with other social differences, and how does legal status shape people’s experiences with key social institutions.

Description: Required Discussion Section Times: F 12:00 PM - 12:50 PM F 1:00 PM - 1:50 PM “Asian American” was once a radical slogan of solidarity; today it is also a census box, a marketing niche, a contested identity. This course explores that evolution by tracing Asian American histories from the late 19th century to the present. We will examine immigration laws, Japanese American incarceration, refugee migrations, and movements for ethnic studies and solidarity, alongside contemporary debates over COVID-era violence, Black–Asian coalitions, and affirmative action. Readings span court cases, activist newspapers, literature, film, and scholarship, asking what it means to claim “Asian American” as both identity and movement, and how its past struggles illuminate the present.

Description: Required Discussion Section Times: F 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM F 12:00 PM - 12:50 PM F 3:00 PM - 3:50 PM Why are Asians all over the world and how did they get there? This course examining the various types of migration that created an Asian diaspora, the communities and collective identities that emerged, and the role played by empires and nation-states. 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: Twenty-first century politicians and their spokespeople have referred to the World War II imprisonment of Japanese Americans as a possible precedent for politics towards Muslims, while others have invoked similar logic relating to “military necessity” to justify poor treatment of immigrants or others deemed a “threat” to U.S. security. Yet many Americans remain ignorant about this important and understudied episode in U.S. history. This discussion-based course examines events leading up to the mass imprisonment of a group of people based on race including the role played by wartime emergency language, the experiences of the imprisoned Americans, and the wartime policy’s consequences. 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: How do we know what we think we know about North Korea? Join an interdisciplinary exploration of one of the world's most discussed yet least accessible countries through an immersive field experience in Seoul, South Korea. Building on work in Asian American Studies and media studies, students will investigate how narratives about North Korea are created, circulated, and contested across media, museums, tourism, and public discourse. The trip includes a visit to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), tours of The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) and the War Memorial of Korea, a walking tour of Itaewon and the site of the former Yongsan Garrison, and conversations with journalists from major international news organizations. Students will also engage with academic scholars and peers to examine South Korean perspectives on North Korea and compare them with dominant Western narratives. Designed for students interested in media, politics, culture, history, and international affairs, this experience challenges participants to think critically about knowledge production, representation, and the power of storytelling in shaping global understanding.

Description: This course is an upper-level seminar that offers an upside-down examination of the Korean War highlighting the narratives of Korean people, be they North Koreans, South Koreans, adoptees, mixed race Koreans, North Korean refugees, koryo saram, chosunjok, Korean Americans, Zainichi, or POW repatriation refusers.. It begins with an examination of the physical devastation of the war and the targeted use of methods and materials such as carpet bombing and napalm and then moves to a discussion of the ideological warfare tactics honed in the war’s interrogation rooms. After a brief discussion of the two nation-states that emerged from the war, the course delves into the new categories of Koreans created by the war: Amerasians, adoptees, military brides, and Zainichi returnees to North Korea. The course concludes with an examination of the Korean War in memory, both collective and individual. The course draws on oral history interviews conducted by the instructor with military brides in the United States, Zainichi Koreans in Japan, and North Korean refugees in China and will include several assignments asking students with Korean language skills to listen to and analyze interview excerpts.

Description: This course uses performance studies as a primary framework to analyze how illness, disability, and wellness are staged, enacted, and reconstituted across Asian American expressive cultures. Rather than treating disability and disease solely as individualized, clinical conditions, we will explore them as dynamic, relational, and political performances shaped by history, race, and empire. Through theater, crip solo performance, film and media, life writing, art, photography, and other visual and expressive forms, students will trace how Asian American bodies navigate multiple and often competing pressures, from model minority myth to medicalized racialization. Course topics will include intergenerational trauma as bodily repertoire, mental health (de)stigmatization, Asian American disability aesthetics, grassroots community care practices, and the cultural staging of death, dying, and collective grief. Students will critically analyze creative works and develop their own projects to reframe care, bodily autonomy, and interdependence.

Description: What is Asian American art? How do the racial and political undercurrents of the designation “Asian American” lend itself to various stylized forms, such as the cyborg, alien, recluse, or Orient? In this class, we will examine a range of art objects and performances by Asian American and Asian diasporic artists—including but not limited to Mitski, Patty Chang, Yoko Ono and Jes Fan—which have emerged out of or in relation to the varied experiences and imaginaries of Asia/ America. Instead of pursing a comprehensive historiography of Asian American art, we turn our attention how these experiments—in video, photography, performance art, and music—elaborate the inconsistencies and resonances that permeate formations of Asia America. Finally, in locating our study at the intersection of Asian American studies and Performance studies, we will learn to lean into our senses (sight, touch, hearing) and the sensory (the visible, invisible, haptic, tactile, whispers, murmurs, screams, etc.) as analytical tools capable of complicating the association between identity and representation.

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: Discussion section is required for Intro to Asian American Studies.

Description: Discussion section is required for Intro to Asian American Studies.

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: 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: In this course, we use food to illuminate histories of migration, colonization, and empire, and to consider 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 examine the construction of multiplicity, authenticity, and hybridity in discourse about Asian American food. We explore Asian American foodways in the local Chicagoland context; there will be at least one mandatory off-campus trip. Contact the instructor for permission to register.

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.