| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. | There is a tendency to think of popular culture as a form of escape from the "real world." This class takes the opposite viewpoint: that popular culture very much reflects, resists, and drives the way we approach the pressing issues of our day. This class looks at Asian American and Asian diasporic popular culture with a special focus on popular culture produced within the context of COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter. While some may argue that these two events – COVID and Black Lives Matter – are separate from each other, bound only by timing, it seems more likely that these two events are signs of a larger problem within American society. The pandemic has revealed and intensified long-standing stereotypes about Asian people as foreign, diseased,and passive, while the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear the nation's roots in white supremacy and anti-Blackness. What role does Asian American popular culture play in responding to such social and political injustices? How has popular culture tended to portray Asian American experience in the past, and how have Asian American creators responded to that portrayal in the current moment and before? How do Asian Americans consume or create culture that has its origins in the Black experience? Materials will consist of essays, op-eds, social media posts, and films. Evaluations will be based on weekly short writing assignments, active class participation, and a final research project. |
| ASIANAM 138 | RACE & URBAN SPACE | QUINTANA, I. | |
| 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 | LEE, J. | This class will introduce students to research topics and methodologies within the field of Asian American Studies. The class is intended to help students identify and formulate individual research topics as well as articulate plans of action for addressing these topics. In addition, the course will serve as an introduction to core and affiliated faculty so that students may identify possible advisors and committee members for their master’s research projects and doctoral theses. Each week, the class will meet to discuss different research issues presented by guest speakers or raised by students in the class. At the end of the class, students will be expected to have made substantial progress towards their research goals, whether in terms of developing a proposal for a master’s thesis, research project, or doctoral thesis, or in terms of completing writing for part of a dissertation chapter or another advanced research project. |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | WU, J. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | VO, L. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | QUINTANA, I. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | LEE, J. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | LEE, J. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | KIM, C. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | FUJITA-RONY, D. | |
| ASIANAM 291 | DIRECTED READING | WU, J. | |
| ASIANAM 291 | DIRECTED READING | VO, L. | |
| ASIANAM 291 | DIRECTED READING | QUINTANA, I. | |
| ASIANAM 291 | DIRECTED READING | LEE, J. | |
| ASIANAM 291 | DIRECTED READING | LEE, J. | |
| ASIANAM 291 | DIRECTED READING | KIM, C. | |
| ASIANAM 291 | DIRECTED READING | FUJITA-RONY, D. | |
| ASIANAM 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | LEE, J. |