My Spring 2025 Courses
Course descriptions
- English 4587: Asian American Literature and Culture — “Immigration and Empire: We Are Here Because You Were There” (Undergraduate)
- English 7858: Seminar in US Ethnic Lit and Culture — “Exploring Linked Histories of African and Asian Peoples” (Graduate)
English 4587: Asian American Literature and Culture
“Immigration and Empire: We Are Here Because You Were There”
TLDR: Many immigrant rights groups, in the face of racism and hate, say: “We are here because you were there.” In this class on Asian American/AAPI literature, culture, and history, we will learn why. In the process we will explore questions of belonging, citizenship, and the role of imperialism in setting conditions for Asian American experiences.
Asians in the US — like all immigrants of color — have always been treated like outsiders. Whether it’s a friendly question (“Where are you from?”), a gasp of appreciation (“I love your people’s food!”) or a hostile retort (“Stop stealing American jobs!”), Asian Americans are repeatedly sent the message that we are not from here, or even not “real Americans.” Our skin, our eyes, our music, our food, our culture, our religion, our language — all get us marked as Other. Being seen as a “forever foreigner” is a key aspect to Asian American racialization.
In this course, we will study literature, film, and nonfictional texts by Asian Americans to understand the many ways this Otherness is experienced by different Asian American/AAPI groups, including those linked to South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Hawai’i, and West Asia (Palestine and the Middle East). Gender, sexuality, and family, we will learn, are key sites at which this racialization happens. We will focus on how these experiences of migration are linked to imperialism — including militarism, colonialism, settler-colonialism, and corporate globalization. While US and European empires figure prominently in this history, we will also examine how Asian powers like Japan, China, Turkey and India have shaped Asian American realities.
Authors may include Viet Thanh Nguyen, Min-Jin Lee, Randa Jarrar, Kamila Shamsie, Edward Said, Haunani-Kay Trask, Suheir Hammad, Agha Shahid Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri
Requirements: Active class participation, weekly posts, two short papers, final research paper, intellectual curiosity.
English 7858: Seminar in US Ethnic Lit and Culture
“Exploring Linked Histories of African and Asian Peoples”
Emphasizing a transnational approach to US Ethnic Studies, this course deploys an interdisciplinary lens to explore the histories and cultural/political interactions of African and Asian peoples across the globe. Examining histories, novels, short stories, film, poetry, essays, comedy, social media, and a variety of texts we will seek to develop a transnational understanding of racialization in the context of capitalist and imperialist modernity while paying careful attention to the specific national and social dynamics that have shaped race differently in each location. Linked histories open up hidden histories of solidarity, but also tensions — and we will explore contemporary examples of recent Black and Palestinian movements in the US in this regard. The course seeks to complicate the dichotomy of “Whiteness” and “Blackness” that dominates US understandings of race and history — among liberals and even radicals.
Assigned texts may include: Cesaire, A Tempest (play), Danticat, The Dew Breaker (short stories). Hwang, M. Butterfly (play), Jarrar, A Map of Home (novel), Kincaid, A Small Place (essay), Nguyen, The Refugees (short stories), Patel, Migritude (fiction/poetry), Reddy/Sudhakar, Feminist and Queer Afro-Asian Formations (collection), and histories like Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America; Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Taylor, From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation.
