Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies
Since the late 1960s, Asian American literature and culture inspired a burgeoning field of academic inquiry. This seminar will examine questions central to Asian American literary and cultural studies. How are the aims, methods, and practices of this field shaped by the activist politics and interdisciplinary methods of ethnic studies? How has it been affected by the post-structuralist turns of contemporary literary and cultural theory? How are the canons and archives of Asian American literature and culture constructed and interpreted? How do scholars working on Asian American literature and culture engage postcolonial theory, transnational and global identities, and comparative racial and ethnic studies? How do contemporary genres of literature, digital arts, and performance challenge scholars to re-envision what Asian American literature and culture means? In addition to requiring an extended research project, the course will also encourage an active pedagogical component that highlights the development of course syllabi and other materials related to teaching Asian American literature and culture.
Readings will include selections from the following works:
- · Frank Chin, "Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake"
- · Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique
- · Shilpa Davé, Leilani Nishime, and Tasha Oren, Global Asian American Popular Cultures
- · David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America
- · Claire Jean Kim, "The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans"
- · Susan Koshy, Sexual Naturalization
- · Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History
- · Julia H. Lee, Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937
- · Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics and The Intimacies of Four Continents
- · Colleen Lye, America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945
- · Daryl Maeda, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America
- · Viet Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America
- · Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Racial Purity
- · Min Song, The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American
- · John Kuowei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882