ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: Survey of Asian diasporas in the United States and elsewhere in the 19th and 20th centuries, emphasizing causes of migration, process of settlement, relations with other ethnic groups, and construction of diasporic identities.

Description: Survey of linguistic anthropological topics relevant to Asian American communities, including bilingualism, code switching, language socialization, language shift, style, sociolinguistic variation, indexicality, media, and semiotics.

Description: Asian American, Asian-American, Asian/American: from Chinese Americans to Hmong Americans to mixed race Asian Americans, from fourth-generation Californians to cosmopolitan college students, from desert internment camps to New York City office buildings, what do the many subjects and locations of Asian American literature tell us about the capaciousness of the category itself? This class has two goals—first, providing an overview of literature written by Asian Americans in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries and placing these texts in conversation with key concepts from Asian American culture and history. Second, interrogating the constructed, pan-ethnic nature of Asian American identity, a category that came into use only in the 1960s as a coalitional entity defined by shared histories of labor, discrimination, and national and cultural unbelonging.

Description: This course offers an in-depth examination of Asian American comics and graphic narratives. How do these texts define what it means to be Asian in America, and what counts as Asian American literature? How do they graphically capture the unique position of Asian Americans as both racially hyper-visible and socially invisible? Readings will include comics by authors such as Gene Yang, Jillian Tamaki, Adrian Tomine, and G.B. Tran, as well as critical essays and theoretical texts on Asian American culture and comics.

Description: How can writers represent inaccessible stories, ones lost to the passage of history? This class explores how literature functions as repositories of minority histories and memories, as meditations on the process of assembling and collecting stories, and as imaginings of alternative histories and futures. Given the difficulty of assembling a coherent Asian American identity, our examinations will be defined as much by the absences, gaps, and contradictions of Asian America’s collective memory as by what is found within it.

Description: This seminar asks how we might engage different scales of violence across the Pacific without reducing them to relics of the past or objects in a museum framed by somber mood. Organized around two multilingual and experimental literary texts set in Japan, Korea, and the White Earth reservation, the seminar will engage further readings from Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. This seminar will be discussion-centered with several writing assignments. No prior knowledge is necessary.

Description: Asian/American gaming is a unique and timely phenomenon. How do games reflect US-Asian geopolitics, from where game hardware is produced and disposed of, and where much video game art and programming is outsourced, to the PR scandal of US-sponsored esports players supporting Hong Kong sovereignty? How does the association of Asians with video games interact with long-standing racial stereotypes of Asians as unplayful or robotic? Students will read and write about gaming, play (and possibly make) games, and hear from Asian/American game developers.