Program in Asian American Studies

Books read in Program in Asian American Studies courses

Readings in recent Program in Asian American Studies courses include, clockwise from top left: Bengali Harlem by Vivek Bald, Insurrecto by Gina Apostol, Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston, Personal Days by Ed Park, The Asian American Achievement Paradox by Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou, Orientalism by Edward W. Said, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid, Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, Subverting Exclusion by Andrea Geiger, Fresh off the Boat by Eddie Huang.

Program in Asian American Studies

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Spring 2023 Courses

Asian-American Psyches: Model Minority, Microaggressions and Mental Health
Subject associations
ASA 238 / PSY 205

This course will analyze and evaluate through a psychological lens the psychosocial causes and consequences of significant current events that impact different Asian groups in the U.S., such as pandemic-spurred anti-Asian sentiment and educational policy (e.g., the debate over magnet schools moving to lottery systems rather than test based), as well as long-standing "everyday" experiences common to Asian Americans (e.g., navigating biculturalism, microaggressions and model minority stereotypes) that may impact identity and mental health.

Instructors
Shirley S. Wang
Asian American Gender and Sexuality
Subject associations
ASA 320 / GSS 377 / AMS 220 / SAS 318

Asian Americans have experienced a long history of contestation regarding gender and sexuality. To examine this saga, we will begin with Black and Asian feminist critiques of normative gender and sexuality. We will then turn to sociocultural history, analyzing legal cases policing intimacy, and the construction of the gendered and sexualized Asian woman in late 19th C. San Francisco. We will then examine histories of normative forms of sexuality, politics and social worlds of queer and trans communities, gendered labor, representation and the post-911 era.

Instructors
Rishi Ramesh Guné
Asian Americans and Identity Politics
Subject associations
ASA 332 / GSS 427 / AAS 371

"Identity politics" has become a derogatory term across the political left and right to name divergent ills shaping contemporary US political culture. Yet present usages stem far from those of the Black queer feminists/socialists who coined the term in 1977. Why have "identity politics" become such a malleable anti-hero? How do Asian Americans figure in these debates? Through the work of Black feminists, postcolonial theorists, and activists, we will explore the liberatory and fraught nature of identity-based movement, tracing how negotiations of difference across gender, racialization, immigration status, and ability shape political culture.

Instructors
Elizabeth H. Rubio
New York Stories: Asian Pacific American Art, Activism, Literature and Film
Subject associations
ASA 389 / ENG 289 / HUM 380

This course will focus on the Asian American arts, culture and youth activist movements in New York City from the early 1970s-1990s. Invited guest speakers--filmmakers, visual and literary artists--will engage with students in talk-story, bridging their cultural practices to present day. We will examine how Asian Americans used their struggle for self-determination and talents to build art, literary and independent film organizations and the projects that they have produced. Students will have the opportunity to produce a creative final project based on oral history interviews with members of Asian American organizations.

Instructors
Angel Velasco Shaw
Asian American Perils: Virus, Vermin, Machine
Subject associations
ANT 316 / ASA 315

This course works through Asian American writings, criticism, ethnography, and cultural production, to explore the persistent identification of Asian American people with nonhuman, disembodied, and dangerous entities. It explores both how Asian American racialization has developed in tandem with figures of contagion, animality, and machinery that undergird and pre-figure the explosion of Covid-era anti-Asian hate crimes; and also how Asian American and other thinkers, ethnographers, and artists chart spaces outside of conventional human-ness through reappropriation of non-human and dehumanizing tropes.

Instructors
Jerry C. Zee
Dangerous Bodies: Cross-Dressing, Asia, Transgression
Subject associations
EAS 314 / GSS 314 / ASA 314

This course examines "dangerous bodies" - bodies that transgress existing gender and racial norms in Chinese and Sinophone cultures. Situated at the intersection of literary, film, performance, gender and ethnic studies, this course provides an introduction to the shifting social meanings of the body in relation to historical masculinity, femininity, and Chineseness. We examine different cross-dressed figures, ranging from Mulan, cross-dressed male opera singer, WWII Japanese/Chinese spy, to experimental queer cinema, in a study that unpacks whether these transgressive bodies represent social change or a tool for restoring traditional norms.

Instructors
Erin Y. Huang
South Asian American Literature and Film
Subject associations
SAS 328 / ASA 328 / COM 358

This course examines literature and film by South Asians in North America. Students will gain perspective on the experiences of immigration and diaspora through the themes of identity, memory, solidarity, and resistance. From early Sikh migration to the American West Coast, to Muslim identity in a post 9/11 world, how can South Asian American stories be read as symbolic of the American experience of gender, class, religion, and ethnicity more broadly? Students will hone their skills in reading primary materials, analyzing them within context, writing persuasively, and speaking clearly.

Instructors
Sadaf Jaffer

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