Fall 2022
Surveying longstanding and emergent themes in the field of Asian American Studies, this course examines how "Asian American" is both a category constructed in service of power and a revolutionary identity formed in rebellion against it. How has US military intervention in Asia in turn shaped shifting ideas about Asian America/the "Asian American"? How might these connections complicate dominant framings of when war begins and ends? In what ways is Asian American racial formation related to settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and racial capitalism, and what might an Asian American movement that is accountable to these processes look like?
From the height of the Asian American movement began at San Francisco State in 1968, the question of where Asian diasporic communities fit within the American racial matrix has been of pivotal interest for scholars, students, activists and artists across genres. This class seeks to explore Asian Americans' social location in the US. Using a relational intersectional feminist approach, this class will examine Asian Americans positionality in relation to Indigenous, Black and Latinx communities throughout the country. Students will engage and hone Asian American Studies interdisciplinary methods (historical, literary and filmic analysis).
In this seminar, students will have the opportunity to explore the diversity of Asian Pacific American cultures, their numerous representations and how APA cultural producers create multidimensional images and narratives. Throughout the semester, students will analyze social issues such as the culture wars, mainstreaming, branding, and centering the margins within mainstream, independent and alternative contexts through utilizing a wide range of film and television screenings; critical and fictional writing; blogs/vlogs; music; social media platforms; and interactions with professionals in film/television, literature, journalism and academia.
Previous Semesters
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Spring 2022
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ASA 336 / GSS 353 / SAS 338 / AMS 301
Since the recent election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the question of who belongs has become central to South Asian politics. These questions of power and belonging reverberate in the diaspora. Because the US is a settler-colonial state, many South Asians find themselves at the interstices of American and South Asian systems of power and flows of capital. In order to examine these processes, this class will use interdisciplinary thematic units across South Asian and Asian American Studies to examine caste, race/racialization, gender/gendering processes and colonialism in the Indian American diaspora.
Instructors: Rishi Ramesh Guné
ASA 430 / ENG 431
In this interdisciplinary course, participants will explore how Asian/Pacific American contemporary literary, media and visual artists create presence for absence in their novels, short stories, poems, cultural essays, films, and visual art depicting a range of Asian/Pacific American experiences. Social issues such as voluntary and forced migration, assimilation, displacement, gender & sexuality, generational differences, youth activism, identity politics, insider/outsider dynamics, the post-colonial condition, and various forms of discrimination within our respective communities as well as across them will be discussed.
Instructors: Angel Velasco Shaw
COM 381 / REL 385 / ASA 381 / EAS 382
This course explores the role of American Christianity in canonical and popular Korean and Korean-American novels and films. While the references to Christianity in these novels and films serve to indicate the active presence of American Christian missionaries in 20th century Korea, we will pay attention to the ways in which the figures of American Christianity function in these narratives.
Instructors: John Park
EAS 314 / COM 398 / 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
ENG 444 / ASA 444 / AMS 443
What happens to narrative when writers aspire to write the world? How has globalization transformed not only the way novels are produced but also the internal form of the works themselves? We'll read novels that overtly strive for a fuller picture of some social or conceptual whole (e.g., migration, climate change, labor, the Internet), especially where they thematize the impossibility of such a project. Students will learn interdisciplinary methods for reading literature's relation to society by examining how writers play with scale, link parts to wholes, and provincialize worlds while rendering the seemingly provincial or mundane worldly.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
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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Fall 2021
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Introduction to Asian American Studies
This course surveys critical themes in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, including perspectives from history, literature, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies. It develops an account of Asian racialization beyond the black-white binary in the context of U.S. war and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands, settler colonialism, globalization, migration, and popular culture. Who or what is an “Asian American”? How have conceptions of Asian America changed over time? How do cultural forms such as literature and film add to an understanding of Asian American identity as a historically dynamic process and social relation?
Instructors: Paul Nadal
Chinatown USA
This course looks at the construction of "Chinatown" — as historic reality, geographic formation, architectural invention, and cultural fantasy — in the heart of America. We will study novels, plays, films, and photography that focus on or use Chinatown as a central backdrop — or even as a conspicuous absence — in ways that highlight the complex relationship between material history and social imagination when it comes to how America incorporates, or fails to digest, its racial or immigrant “others.”
Instructors: Anne Cheng
Asian American History
This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.
Instructors: Beth Lew-Williams
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Spring 2021
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Asian American Literature and Culture
What is the relationship between race and genre? Through a survey of major works and debates in Asian American literature, this course examines how writers employ a variety of generic forms — novels, comics, memoirs, film, science fiction — to address issues of racial and ethnic identity, gender, queerness, memory, immigration, and war. By placing racial formation in relation to social, economic, and intellectual developments, we will explore the potential of literary texts to deepen our historical understanding of Asians in the United States and beyond, and probe into what labeling a work of literature as “Asian American” allows us to know and do.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
Asian American Autobiography
This class attempts to square the circle by using Asian American autobiographies as a lens through which to understand immigration and colonial history, and connect them to contemporary projects of Asian American political mobilization. While Asian American autobiography can serve as a way to translate one’s assimilation into American nationhood, this course seeks to destabilize all three terms in its title. We will read texts not intended as literary, transnational works that challenge what it means to be “American” literature; and others texts by authors at the boundaries of a Pan-Asian identity, such as Arab and Indo Caribbean writers.
Instructors: Ken Chen
EAS 314 / COM 398 / GSS 314 / ASA 314
Dangerous Bodies: Cross-Dressing, Asia, Transgression
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 Yu-Tien Huang
Asian American History
This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.
Instructors: Beth Lew-Williams
South Asian American Literature and Film
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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Fall 2020
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Model Minority Fictions
Where did the stereotype of Asian Americans as model minorities — overachieving whiz kids, industrious workers, “tiger mothers,” “crazy rich” Asians — come from? What accounts for the model minority myth’s persistence today? How has its representational scheme changed over time? Does model minoritism have a literary (and not only social) history? By reading across fiction, visual culture, and economic history, this seminar traces the changing definitions of Asians in the United States from “yellow peril” to model minorities: from the myth’s wartime origins, to the birth of American neoliberalism, and onward to the global rise of Asia in the 21st century.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
CWR 316 / AAS 336 / LAO 316 / ASA 316
Special Topics in Poetry: Race, Identity and Innovation
This workshop explores the link between racial identity and poetic innovation in work by contemporary poets of color. Experimental or avant-garde poetry in the American literary tradition has often defined itself as “impersonal,” “against expression” or “post-identity.” Unfortunately, this mindset has tended to exclude or downplay poems that engage issues of racial identity. This course explores works where poets of color have treated racial identity as a means to destabilize literary ideals of beauty, mastery and the autonomy of the text while at the same time engaging in poetic practices that subvert conceptions of identity or authenticity.
Instructors: Monica Youngna Youn
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Spring 2020
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Asian American Literature and Culture
This course is an introductory survey of the major works and debates in Asian American literature and culture. We will study a variety of genres — novels, short stories, comics, memoirs, films, and science fiction — to examine how writers treat issues of racial and ethnic identity, gender, queerness, history, memory, colonialism, immigration, technology, and war. By placing Asian American subject formation in relationship to social, economic, and intellectual developments, we will explore the potential of Asian American literary texts to deepen our global and historical understanding of Asians in the United States and the United States in Asia.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
Black and Asian in America
Debates over policing, immigration, and affirmative action routinely position Black and Asian communities on opposing sides, while the model minority myth has been redeployed in the twenty-first century in the form of the Tiger Mom. How did we get here, and what do these trends mean for our daily lives? We respond to these questions by looking at fiction, film, and foodways from the last 30 years of Black-Asian relations in America. Using a comparative race and ethnic studies approach, we identify ways of thinking and talking about interracial difference that forge new paths for social, cultural, and political engagement.
Instructors: Kinohi Nishikawa
EAS 314 / COM 398 / GSS 314 / ASA 314
Dangerous Bodies: Cross-Dressing, Asia, Transgression
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 Yu-Tien Huang
South Asian American Literature and Film
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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Fall 2019
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‘Too Cute!’: Race, Style, and Asiamania
What does a minor and shallow category like “cuteness” have to do with the abject histories of race and gender? This course offers an introduction to key terms in Asian American studies through the lens of the seemingly insatiable American appetite for “Asian cuteness.” How do we reconcile this desire with the long history of anti-Asian sentiments in this country? Why aren’t other races “cute”? We will explore cuteness as racial and gendered embodiment, commodity, globalization, aesthetics, affect, and politics. Above all, we explore the implications of understanding race as a style.
Instructors: Anne Cheng
Multiethnic American Short Stories: Tales We Tell Ourselves
Short stories have been used by writers to make concise, insightful comments about American national identity and individuality. Taken up by African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and many others, the genre has been used to convey experiences with immigration and assimilation, discrimination and oppression, generational divides, and interactions across difference. Examination of such stories deepens our understanding of America’s multiethnic landscape. In this seminar, we will explore stories written by a diverse group of writers to consider the ties that both link and divide multiethnic America.
Instructors: Tessa Lowinske Desmond
Global Novel
How do novels represent the global? How have new media systems and economic exchange transformed not only the way novels are produced and distributed but also the internal form of the literary works themselves? This course examines how writers register the interconnected nature of modern life and the narrative strategies that they invent to make sense of migration, war, urbanization, and financialization. Students will learn interdisciplinary methods for reading literature’s potential for sociological and historical knowledge by considering how the global novel grapples with empire and what political futures it forecloses and opens up.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
Asian American History
This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.
Instructors: Beth Lew-Williams
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Spring 2019
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Introduction to Asian American Studies
This course surveys critical themes in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, including perspectives from history, literature, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies. It develops an account of Asian racialization beyond the Black-white binary in the context of U.S. war and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands, settler colonialism, globalization, migration, and popular culture. Who or what is an “Asian American”? How have conceptions of Asian America changed over time? How do cultural forms such as literature and film add to an understanding of Asian American identity as a historically dynamic process and social relation?
Instructors: Paul Nadal
AMS 301 / ENG 432 / GSS 338 / ASA 301
Science Fiction and Fact
How does science fiction challenge “facts” about the biology of race, gender, sexuality and other categories of difference? This seminar explores the ways in which contemporary sci-fi that centers the experiences of marginalized communities reconceptualizes the techniques and technologies of social differentiation. The readings couple a sci-fi text with work by scholars across disciplines who have drawn attention to the reemergence of race as a biological rather than social category in genetics and genomics research.
Instructors: Tala Khanmalek
South Asian American Literature and Film
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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Fall 2018
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ASA 347 / AMS 347 / ENG 426 / GSS 358
The Asian American Family
This seminar examines the emergence and transformation of the Asian American family as a social form. We will investigate how U.S. labor demands and legal restrictions on immigration and citizenship militated against the formation of Asian American families, and how paper sons, military wives, refugees, adoptees, and LGBT family experiences eluded norms of kinship. We will also study the significance of the intergenerational trope in Asian American literature, and how writers responded to neoliberalism’s remaking of the “Asian” family according to the model minority myth.
Instructors: Paul Nadal
Asian American Affect
This course uses major studies of affect as a lens through which to view Asian American literary texts. At the same time, it reads Asian American literary texts as interventions in affect theory. Are there distinctively Asian American modes of affect? Asian American structures of feeling? If so, what ethical and representational dilemmas do they present? What political and aesthetic possibilities do they open up? How have they been shaped by histories of traumatic dislocation, exile, incarceration, and racialization? How do they condition the experience of temporality? What futures might they enable?
Instructors: James Kim
AMS 404 / ASA 404 / LAO 404 / THR 404
Advanced Seminar in American Studies: Race and Ethnicity in 20th-Century Popular Performance
This course offers an intensive introduction to the particular tools, methods and interpretations employed in developing original historical research and writing about race and ethnicity in 20th-century popular performance (film, television, theater). Through collaborative, in-depth excavations of several genre-straddling cultural works, course participants will rehearse relevant methods and theories (of cultural history, of race and ethnicity, of popular culture/performance) and will undertake an independent research project elaborating the course's guiding premise and principles of practice.
Instructors: Brian Eugenio Herrera