| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| ASIANAM 53 | ASIAN AMER & RACE | KIM, C. | This course examines the racialization of Asian Americans in the U.S. from the mid-1800s to the present, with special attention to the role anti-blackness has played in shaping the status and experience of Asian Americans. How have Asian Americans been positioned in, and how have they positioned themselves in, an anti-black racial order? Topics to be covered include: Chinese “coolies”; the racial advancement strategies adopted by early Asian immigrants; Japanese American internment and the emergence of the model minority myth; the relationship of the Asian American Movement to the Black Power movement; the Los Angeles uprising of 1992; the politics of disposability around Hurricane Katrina; recent developments in the fight over affirmative action; and Asian American responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. |
| ASIANAM 55 | ASAM & THE MEDIA | CHO, J. | This course investigates types of messages created, consumed, propagated, and repeated by and about Asian Americans in American culture[1]. We will examine popular representations of and media productions by Asian Pacific Americans and Asians in the Americas from the late-nineteenth century to the present. Our cultural media genres and forms will include film, television, newspapers and magazines, comics and graphic novels, and internet-based digital forms such as YouTube channels, and social media tools. The course will also explore cases of different sites and communities of Asian Americans using media activism in desire and imaginings of cultural citizenship. Interrogating the politics and meanings of media facing Asian Americans calls for understanding historical contexts of U.S.- Asia relations, immigration, accessible technologies, social movements, and institutions and structures of dominant and oppositional media. We will consider how changes in political, social, and cultural discourses inform Asian Americans’ relations to media form, content, funding, and active participation in shaping meaning. ______________________________________________ [1] Shilpa Dave, “Media,” page 148. Keywords for Asian American Studies. Eds. Cathy Schund-Vials, Linda Trinh Vo, K. Scott Wong. New York University Press, 2015. |
| ASIANAM 110 | COMING OF AGE ASAM | LEE, J. | What is it like to grow up Asian American in the United States? What kinds of expectations, pressures, obstacles, stereotypes, and exclusions do young Asian Americans face and how do they respond? This course examines those questions in contemporary Asian American culture: film, narrative fiction, graphic novels, and essays. Our focus will be on understanding the unique demands placed on Asian American subjects as they emerge from childhood and adolescence into adulthood. We will start by thinking about the broad genre of the bildungsroman and how its conventions are used, adapted, revised, or rejected by Asian American writers. We will examine how the experience of racial alterity affects the development of Asian American identities as well as the role that ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality play in these coming of age stories. Graduate students enrolled in this course will also become familiar with critical conversations pertaining to Asian American literary and cultural theory. |
| ASIANAM 143 | RELIGIOUS TRAD ASAM | STAFF | 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 see 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. Specific issues of religious practice, intergenerational relationships, gender and sexuality, and political solidarity are among the topics that will be explored in this course. |
| ASIANAM 150 | RACE & RELIGION | STAFF | This course surveys how the contested analytics of race and religion have drawn upon each other to shape individual and group identities in the United States, through two vectors. One, the course will explore specific conceptual sites—such as religious freedom, Orientalism, sacrifice, conversion as “passing,” and settler colonialism—to understand how ideas about religious being underlined or justified racialized performances. Two, by looking at different accounts of religion, we will also wrestle with how modern genealogies of religion are inherently racial in character. The course will be as much about understanding subjects who feel and navigate their ways through race and religion as it will be about seeing how people have thought about these dual realities as an object of study. |
| ASIANAM 200C | COMM LEAD&SOC CHNG | LEE, J. | This course will introduce students to models of community-engaged learning and leadership that are central to the field of Asian American Studies. The course assignments, discussions, and guest speakers are designed to expose students to the histories of social movements and organizing in Asian American Pacific Islander communities; community-based organizing models; contemporary community issues; and Southern California-based non-profit organizations, including organizations designed to preserve and present the history and culture of Asian American Pacific Islanders. The readings, drawn from academic research, journalistic reports, policy-oriented studies, and websites, will presents students with a variety of research approaches and presentation models. |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | FUJITA-RONY, D. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | KIM, C. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | LEE, J. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | VO, L. | |
| ASIANAM 290 | DIRECTED RESEARCH | WU, J. |