| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ASIANAM 52 | ASAM COMMUNITIES | LEE, J. | This course will introduce students to a range of social, cultural, literary, economic, and political discourses concerning the construction and transformation of Asian American identities and communities. We will study the historical and contemporary developments of ethnic communities that are located in specific geographical sites as well as those that are non-territorial social networks. Students will learn how these communities negotiate the spatial, political, and social terrains of generational, ethnic, gender, sexual, class, religious, and ideological differences. Lectures will include theories about voluntary and involuntary communities, ethnic enclaves, racial formation and racialization, and interracial relations. The aim of the class will be to provide students with the critical thinking skills to understand concepts such as nationalism, colonialism, immigration, citizenship, racialization, and representation and how these issues frame the debates concerning Asian American belonging, exclusion, and equity. |
| ASIANAM 100W | RSCH METH/FIELD RES | QUINTANA, I. | In this course, we will explore a range of research methodologies in Asian American Studies and, more broadly, in Ethnic Studies. The readings are organized around questions, approaches, and critiques that will help students develop qualitative research skills, while also considering the politics of research and representation. Students are required to complete daily short written assignments, a research project, and in-class presentations. Peer-writing exchange workshops will be a key component of our learning. |
| ASIANAM 111 | ASIANAM LIFEWRITING | WU, J. | How many historically significant Asian Americans can you identify? This racialized group has been represented as the yellow peril and the model minority. How might historical and creative approaches to research and narration give us insight into the lived experiences and the identities of Asian Americans of diverse ethnic and generational backgrounds? (same as History 152) |
| ASIANAM 114 | ASAM NONFIC FILM | CHO, J. | This interdisciplinary course examines documentary film, experimental nonfiction, oral history, community media, archival practice, and podcasting not simply as forms of representation, but as modes of testimony, evidence, memory work, political intervention, and community history. The course also introduces students to documentary modes and points of view, and introductory training for oral history and interviewing. We also study Asian Americans’ active interventions to access and develop institutional infrastructures that continue to support story work, including community media organizations, festivals, and archives. |
| ASIANAM 138 | RACE & URBAN SPACE | QUINTANA, I. | This upper-division undergraduate course takes the city as a starting point to understand larger social and political developments in the United States. Processes of segregation and exclusion have placed nonwhite people on the periphery of social, cultural and geographical power in the nation. Histories of racialization tell us that power has always been contested, negotiated, and shaped by people and institutions in historical context—specific times and places. |
| ASIANAM 150 | S ASIA MEDIA & DIAS | SHROFF, B. | This course examines how the global reach of popular Hindi-language cinema of India referred to as Bollywood film creates new representations of nationalism and national narratives. Increasing travel, changing modes of life and material expansion even within India and within the Indian diasporas have generated transnational and international movements of people, media and commodities and Bollywood is a major player in these movements and markets. The masculinist space of nation as represented in older films is transformed as gender and sexuality intersect with social categories of class and particularly caste and religion. As an increasingly transnational and global product, Bollywood’s glittering, glitzy dance and song routines reconstruct femininity and masculinity, gender and sexuality, and family identities in ways that attempt to challenge patriarchal, and nationalist discourses. Selected films include The Lover Wins the Bride, Monsoon Wedding and My Name Is Khan. As a counterpoint to Bollywood's conventions of gender production, we analyze some independently produced films that deploy the language of Bollywood, and attempt to contest its conflicted messages of gender and nation. |
| ASIANAM 151F | SOUTH ASAM STUDIES | SHROFF, B. | The class brings together diverse perspectives on the experiences of South Asians in America. South Asian countries include India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh among others. From the historical presence of South Asians in America in the 1920s, to the experience of pop culture like bhangra remix, and the lives of working class taxi drivers in New York City, after 9/11. We examine the experience of South Asians in America as one of multiple belongings, and hybrid identities that are complicated connections between the culture of the U.S. and the homeland. Selected materials include stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, sociological readings on citizenship dilemmas after 9/11 and selected films like Turbans, Junky Punky Girlz and Knowing Her Place. |
| ASIANAM 162 | ASIAN AMER WOMEN | LEE, J. | This course examines the lives, histories, narratives, media, and cultures created and experienced by “Asian American women.” As I hope our readings and discussion will make clear, although it appears to be a self-evident term describing a definable group of people, “Asian American women” actually operates as a highly contested category, in which different discourses and histories surrounding race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and filiation collide. We will study the history of Asian women in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present as well as the pervasive cultural narratives that have been and still are associated with Asian American femininity. The primary focus of the class will be to analyze the multitudinous ways that Asian American women have resisted and/or negotiated these stereotypes via literature, art, film, documentary, stand-up comedy, and digital culture. The material we will discuss in class ranges widely, from literary texts, to documentaries, to stand-up comedy, to articles from the disciplines of English, sociology, public health, gender studies, legal studies and history. |
| ASIANAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ASIANAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ASIANAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF | |
| ASIANAM 199 | INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |