| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ASIANAM **** | STAFF | ||
| ASIANAM 50 | ASAM HISTORIES | FUJITA-RONY, D. | This class will give students the tools to understand the major issues affecting Asian Americans up through the 1980s, particularly in regards to race, class, gender, ethnicity, community, and nation. In addition, this class also will enable students to explore how we produce historical knowledge through three major themes, with integrated discussions of different kinds of texts, images, and other sources. With the first theme, “Empire and Nation,” we will investigate the relationship of the United States to the Pacific, particularly regarding colonialism, race, class, and the economy. The second theme, “Labor, Migration, and Place” will examine the importance of urban and rural sites for Asian Americans during this era. The third theme, “Whose Voice? Whose Vision?” will address the importance of community formation and cultural representation through focus on the building of Asian American spaces in the United States. |
| ASIANAM 54 | ASAM STORIES | LEE, J. | What does it mean to be “Asian American”? The primary goal of this class is to explore how writers have attempted to answer that question through the stories they tell. To that end, we will close-read a broad range of cultural productions – short and long fiction, film, poetry, and essays – with an eye towards contextualizing them in their particular historical, social, and cultural milieus. The class will pay special attention to how axes of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and citizenship impact the formation and articulation of Asian American identities in these works. While the readings are organized in a thematic fashion, my hope is that you will make connections as well as note the disjunctures between all of the readings. |
| ASIANAM 114 | ASNAM LIT/FLM ADAPT | STAFF | This course analyzes the historical context within which Asian American literary texts have been adapted into filmic texts. A historical context demonstrates how representations of Asian Americans have changed from the stereotypical images in the 1920s to self-representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. We analyze different literary genres such as novels, dramas and short stories, for example Mohsin Hamid’s novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Le Ly Hayslip's memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and David Henry Hwang's drama, M. Butterfly. Cinematic adaptations/versions of literary texts sometimes re-title and reconstruct source texts, as suitable for a mass audience, such as Heaven and Earth Oliver Stone’s adpatation of Le Ly Hayslip's memoir When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. We interrogate the strengths of each medium and the spatial and temporal capabilities of the cinematic medium. |
| ASIANAM 114 | BRUCE LEE | MIMURA, G. | Bruce Lee was a martial artist, actor, teacher, pop philosopher, and one of the most dynamic superstars of the late-twentieth century. Supremely confident, intensely narcissistic, Lee was a consummate performer on-screen and in everyday life: his transnational experiences became the stage for a richly postmodern, postcolonial identity. Starring in only four (or five) martial arts films, he nonetheless helped to transform two film industries, extend the reach of cinema as an international medium, and inspire and empower the less powerful throughout the world. Since his untimely death in 1973, Lee’s larger-than-life persona has proliferated and taken on new meanings, achieving the stature of a truly global icon. This course will examine Bruce Lee’s life and career in the contexts of the Hollywood and Hong Kong industries of the 1960s–70s, and track his influence in the history of cinema and other media. We will screen enhanced, subtitled editions of the Chinese releases of his Hong Kong films. It will also situate his work and identity––Hong Kong native, diasporic Chinese, Asian American––in relation to the social, cultural, political, and economic changes taking place in the United States and East Asia broadly. As a class, we will assess the significance and meaning of Bruce Lee’s legacy today. |
| ASIANAM 143 | RELIGIOUS TRAD ASAM | KOH-PARSONS, S. | While the 2012 Pew Report on Religion accurately notes the religious diversity of Asian Americans, Christians remain the largest subset of this group. This course will provide a survey of Asian American Christianities through a variety of historical, ethnographic, literary, and religious texts. We will explore how Asian American Christians have adopted and interpreted their Christian beliefs and practices in relation to their ethnic and racial identities, as well as how larger discourses of race and immigration have corresponded to broadly Christian ideas about conversion and belonging. No previous knowledge of either Asian American Christian thought and practice, or religious thought is required to successfully complete this course. Cross-listed with Sociology 136. |
| ASIANAM 151F | SOUTH ASAM STUDIES | STAFF | 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 garba with attitude, 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 domestic violence, citizenship dilemmas after 9/11 and selected films like Turbans, and Knowing Her Place. |
| ASIANAM 164 | KOREA-US TRANSNATL | STAFF | Using the Korean Wave (South Korean popular culture) as a major case study, this class asks how and why a society that experienced highly compressed political and economic changes, has made such transnational activities possible. In particular, a study of Korean popular culture allows us to consider historically specific responses to globalization in a state that is divided and diasporic. By looking at films, pop songs, television serials, sports, cosmetic, and culinary industries, along with independent performance projects, we examine nation-building and branding, diasporic identity formation, and transnational capital and labor. We also consider how Korean American and Asian American engagements with Korean popular culture illuminate meanings of race and gender. Our course seeks to bring a critical eye to everyday sources of information, understand academic arguments of scholars in a range of disciplines, and to support students to be producers of knowledge who contribute to existing scholarship on popular culture. |
| ASIANAM 200A | THEORY&METH ASAM ST | LEE, J. | This graduate level course examines key paradigms and research approaches in the field of Asian American Studies. Founded in the late 1960s as a central demand of the Third World Liberation movements, Asian American Studies has deepened our collective understandings of racialization and capitalism, immigration and refugeeism, citizenship and exclusion, diaspora and transnationalism, U.S. empire and militarism, Orientalism and intersectionality, among other important intellectual and political formations. This course will focus on the emerging scholarship that animates the field of Asian American Studies. |
| ASIANAM 200D | INTRO ASAM RESEARCH | FUJITA-RONY, D. | This course will introduce students to research topics & methods within the field of Asian American Studies. Each week, students will meet core and affiliated Asian American Studies faculty at UCI as well as read their published work and/or works-in-progress, sometimes alongside foundational texts within the field. This course aims to expose students to UCI faculty research and help them identify possible advisors for M.A. research projects or members of doctoral committees. At the end of the course, each student will create a work plan outlining his/her research project topic and methods. |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | BALANCE, C. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | FUJITA-RONY, D. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | KIM, C. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | LEE, J. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | WU, J. |