Asian American Cultural Studies

This course examines Asian American cultural production and the political histories of various Asian American communities. We place a wide range of primary texts, including fiction, poetry, film, television, and visual art, in conversation with larger political and cultural questions about race, gender, citizenship, imperialism, and belonging in the US. The course is organized around four major events in Asian American history: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the subsequent exclusion of Asian immigrants in the decades that followed; the incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during World War II; Cold War Orientalism after WWII; the racial politics of imperial war and Islamophobia in the post-9/11 United States; and the sharp increase in anti-Asian racial violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also consider the historical movements and migrations of people of Asian descent to North America; US wars in Asia; the conflicts of identity, community, and citizenship; the gender and sexual dynamics of Asian American racialization; and the relationship of Asian Americans to other communities of color. In doing so, this course grapples with what it means for Asian America to have been characterized and circumscribed by a multitude of cultural discourses—legal, geopolitical, and textual—throughout dominant as well as subversive narratives of US history.