| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 116 | ASIANAM POP CULTURE | LEE, J. | This course begins with the recent Asian American YouTube phenomenon as a launching point for discussing 1) independent media by and 2) mainstream popular representations of Asians/Asian Americans throughout U.S. cultural history. Employing theories of cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies, we will discuss the style and impact of various popular cultural forms and representations created by, for, and about Asians/Asian Americans. This course will examine popular cultural genres/media: zines/blogs/indie publishing, karaoke & cover performances, documentary & narrative film, television/variety shows, theatre/stand-up comedy, and popular music. It will focus on themes/issues raised by the recent YouTube explosion—the transnational/domestic nature of Asian America, the archiving & distribution of oppositional performances & politics, participatory culture, and the “phantasms of Orientalness.” Course assignments include: lecture/discussion sections, weekly reading responses, midterm, and a final online group project. |
| ASIANAM 138 | RACE & URBAN SPACE | QUINTANA, I. | This course examines the impact of urban space on experiences of race and racial difference. We tend to think of space as simply setting – a blank canvas upon which we live our lives. This class hopes to make clear that urban and other kinds of environments play a crucial role in the formation of both individuals, communities, and the interactions between these groups. The first part of the quarter will be devoted to considering how the space of the city produces, naturalizes, and/or replicates various social and political hierarchies. The second and third units of this class are case-studies and will focus on two kinds of urban spaces associated with Asian Americans: the ethnic ghetto (Chinatowns, K-towns, Little Tokyos, Little Saigons, and the like) and the ethnoburb (ethnic suburbs attached to large cities). Drawing upon the fields of anthropology, geography, cultural studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, literary criticism, and urban history, we will explore how Asian Americans negotiate their racial identities within these specific kinds of spaces. |
| ASIANAM 142 | MUSLIM IDENT NO AMR | HAMDY, S. | "This course explores the multiple identities of Muslims in North America, focusing on the diversity within the ""community."" Please note that it is not a course on Islam or on solely religious identities, although Islam may indeed be an important component of identity for many Muslims. As sacred texts and believers move across national boundaries, and as people indigenous to one place convert to religions coming from other places, transformations of religions and personal identities inevitably occur. We will talk about identities in ways that emphasize instability, construction in context, and reinterpretations of the past in the present. In North America, there are Muslims of many national, ethnic, racial, and/or class origins; gender and generational differences are also important. We rely on lectures, readings, films, and class discussion, with teams doing short research projects and reporting to the class in the final weeks." |
| ASIANAM 150 | BOLLYWOOD FILM | 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 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 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 162 | ASIAN AMER WOMEN | QUINTANA, I. | This course examines a variety of works by and about Asian American women in order to understand how diverse, complicated, and conflicted that subject position can be. Although it appears to be a self-evident term describing a definable group of authors, “Asian American women” actually operates as a highly contested category, in which different discourses surrounding race, gender, nationality, and sexuality collide. 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, gender studies, legal studies and history. You should feel free to draw connections and distinctions between the texts as we read them. Some of the questions we might consider in our discussions: How is the identity marker “Asian American woman” understood? What purpose does the constructed term “Asian American women” serve? What expectations about race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship do these works shatter and which do they reinforce? |
| 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. |