| 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 114 | ASNAM DOCUMTRY PRAC | CHO, J. | Our examination into Asian American documentary practices will be two-fold. We will begin with the elements and evolution of documentary film language and genres in the United States as a foundation for understanding how Asian American media artists utilize the mediums of film and video toward particular communication goals. We will also trace the movement of documentary subjects and techniques in the context of Asian Americans’ historical conditions, racialized representations, and social/cultural/labor roles in nonfiction films. As we view a range of works by and about Asian Americans, we will consider how various makers engage strategies for production style and content, target audiences, authenticity, emotional truth, and aesthetic experimentation in evolving environments of technology and access, social movements, ethnic notions. Our examination will be deployed toward the proposal of a feasible short documentary project about Asian American lived realities. Students will pose their critical understanding of cinematic language and social meaning to the considerations and challenges a producer faces to execute a finished film. Working alone or in groups, students will undergo documentary production “readiness” by preparing topic research, story goals, stylization strategy, logistical, copyright, and budget factors, target audience/distribution, and community engagement plans typically required by individual donors, commercial funders and non-profit grant organizations. |
| 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 151D | VIET AMER STUDIES | STAFF | At what point in time did Vietnamese America begin? Did it begin with the Fall of Saigon? Or did it began with the first established Little Saigon? In looking to define what it is, do we limit what Vietnamese America has been and what it could be? This course will honor and center the complexity of community, bearing witness to the multiple realities and truths that exist. By utilizing a critical refugee lens, we will examine how social structures like capitalism and nationalism are interwoven into the Vietnamese American experience. This course seeks to unravel, understand, and complicate what Vietnamese America is and who gets to tell the Vietnamese American experience. This course aims to: Introduce how power and privilege plays a role in the history, culture, and contemporary experiences of Vietnamese Americans. Expand current discourse around social issues that affect Vietnamese Americans by using different ways of knowing, such as scientific literature, creative works and scholarly articles. Expose students to the multitude of historical, contemporary and local Vietnamese American narratives, taking advantage of the proximity to one of the largest Little Saigons. |
| ASIANAM 164 | KOREAN ADOPTION | LEE, J. | This course introduces students to the 60-year political economy of transnational adoption of children from Korea to the US (and other parts of the West) and the cultural productions of Korean adoptees. We will critically engage the discourse of the “rescue” of children and the construction of the Korean “orphan” to create Western desire and demand, and explore how adoptees themselves are reframing adoption through literature, film, and activism, as well as building new networks of solidarity with unwed mothers in Korea. |
| ASIANAM 200C | COMM LEAD&SOC CHNG | FUJITA-RONY, D. | 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 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | CHO, J. | |
| ASIANAM 399 | UNIVERSITY TEACHING | KIM, C. |