| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ASIANAM 50 | BEGINNING TAGALOG I | ALCEDO, P. | This course will focus on developing oral language skills in Tagalog by active participation in class. Talking, listening, interacting, and presenting will be emphasized. Since knowledge of basic Tagalog grammar is necessary in acquiring those skills, lessons in it will also be given. The course will require quizzes, two major exams, and a final oral presentation. Instead of the traditional approach that focuses on grammar and structure, this course will adopt a functional and situational approach. Students will learn Tagalog while conversing with each other, staging games in class, or performing certain roles. Through those creative activities, the course will provide opportunity for students to speak and comprehend Tagalog in familiar situations that they can then practice with their friends and family outside the classroom. |
| ASIANAM 60B | INTRODUCTION TO ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES II | VO, L. | (Same as Soc Sci 78B) This class will cover the major issues affecting Asian Americans in the post-World War II era, particularly in regard to race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Topics will include labor, immigration, colonialism, community formation, public policy agendas, political participation, education, and cultural production. The requirements will be a mid-term, a short paper assignment, a final exam, and class participation in section. |
| ASIANAM 110 | ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS LIFE STORIES | YAMADA, M. | (Same as Eng 105/LJ 103) In \"Writing Lifestories\" we will do more than recover personal memories and retell family stories. Most of us carry fragments of images, memories, dreams and stories, a mixture of Asian and American cultures, collected through our own lifetime and through the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents. In \"Writing Lifestories\" these fragments of our Asian ancestral ties may be melded together into an artistic whole. This melding process will be done through putting those personal fragments in context by researching the historical and cultural backgrounds of our ancestors. Through collecting visual images of periods long past as well as myths and tales, we may see and hear the world as our ancestors saw and heard it. Through exploring the sign of the times when they first stepped foot on the new land that would become their home, we may come to understand their hopes, dreams and fears and capture the interior life of a transformed culture. Toni Morrison called it \"a kind of literary archeology.\" \"If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning,\" she tells us, \"it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.\" We will examine creative works that combine family stories and historical data. Course requirements: 1. Informal response papers on the works assigned. 2. In lieu of a final exam, a final project of your findings including writings and documentation. 3. An annotated bibliography of your sources. 4. An oral report. |
| ASIANAM 114 | SEXUALITY IN ASIAN AMERICAN FILM | SHROFF, B. | (Same as Soc Sci 179) This course analyzes sexuality and gender roles in specific social, historical and political contexts represented in selected Asian and Asian American films and videos. We will examine how controls on sexuality in patriarchal cultures question, dismantle or reinforce the status quo. Different representations of male and female sexuality as depicted in selected films and readings explore how the body becomes a contested terrain for various manifestations of desire. Our study will include an analysis of various sexual and social roles and definitions such as dutiful daughter, all-giving wife and mother and issues of lesbian and gay sexuality. We will analyze films like “Spices” where desire is locked into relations of gender and colonial power in an Indian village. In a film like “Dirty Laundry” film maker Richard Fung probes into Asian American history to explore the homosocial and homosexual spaces inhabited by immigrant men who came as bachelors to the U.S. at the turn of the century. Grades will be based on attendance and class participation, weekly journals, a midterm and a final essay. |
| ASIANAM 114 | ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE/FILM ADAPTATION | SHROFF, B. | (Same as Comp Lit 104, Lec B/HumArts 101) This course analyzes the historical context within which Asian American texts have been adapted into films. There is a vast body of Asian American Literature but very few texts have been adapted to cinema since issues of audience and market are primary considerations. A historical context demonstrates how representations of Asian Americans have changed from the stereotypical images in the 1920\'s to self-representations by Asian American writers and filmmakers in contemporary times. This course examines the interplay between literary texts and their film adaptations. We will analyze different literary genres such as novels and dramas, for example Amy Tan\'s novel \"The Joy Luck Club\", and David Henry Hwang\'s drama, \"M. Butterfly\". Cinematic adaptations/versions of literary texts sometimes retitle and reconstruct texts as suitable for a mass audience, such as \"Heaven and Earth\" directed by Oliver Stone and others such as \"Hot Summer Winds\" directed by Emiko Omori based on two Hisaye Yamamoto short stories from \"Seventeen Syllables\". We employ literary and film theory in reading the novels and plays to analyze language, structure, characterization and historical representation. We also discuss how the literary form translates into a visual medium, and the modifications of story/plot and characterization for the screen--for instance, how dramas lend themselves to screen adaptation more easily than do novels. We interrogate the strengths of each medium such as the scope of the fictional framework, and the spatio-temporal capabilities of the cinematic medium. Students will write a weekly journal on films and readings. There will be a midterm and a final essay. |
| ASIANAM 131 | ASIAN AMERICAN POLITICS OF EDUCATION | ROBLES, R. | This course would offer an introduction to educational issues within the Asian American community. I would focus on historical and contemporary topics incorporating education issues and topics for both native born and immigrant Asian Americans. Students will review the public policy as well as racial implications within K-12 public education and post-secondary education for Asian Americans. Topics and issues will range from bilingual education, school desegregation, the Model Minority stereotype, and inter-racial dynamics involving Asian Americans within the United States education system. Through this course, I hope students will gain a sense of not only how Asian Americans are positioned within the public system of education but also will be able to adeptly dissect and analyze education policy and history through a racial lens. I hope that students will be able to expand the proverbial black and white paradigm of race and race relations as it relates to education and education policy issues. Course grade will be based on midterm exam, research paper, presentation, class participation & attendance, and final exam. |
| ASIANAM 131 | ASIAN AMERICAN POLITICS OF GENDER/RACE | ROBLES, R. | This course focuses on the social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions of Asian American men and women’s experiences within the context of Asian American and U.S. history. It is designed to critically examine and utilize the intersections of gender and race as categories of analysis in the major debates associated with issues of class, labor, expressions of desire, and the politics of representation. Using ideas from racial and ethnic studies and feminist studies, this course offers a critical approach to examine the matrix of domination and investigates the construction of gender knowledges and their social and political impacts. Course grade will be based on book reviews, midterm exam, paper, class participation & attendance, and final exam. |
| ASIANAM 151H | SOUTHEAST ASIAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | VO, L. | (Same as Soc Sci 178H) More than one million refugees and immigrants from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam have settled in the United States, with large communities in existence throughout California. This course provides a comparative overview of ethnically, culturally, and historically diverse peoples, who were forced to relocate as refugees and immigrants. We will analyze their resettlement processes, economic adaptations, educational experiences, and social conditions. Our focus will be on their individual voices and experiences in order to understand how they construct their identities, negotiate cultural challenges, recreate communities, and engage in acts of resistance. We will use an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon theoretical frameworks and scholarship from anthropology, education, history, political science, psychology, social work, cultural studies, and sociology. Course grade will be based on a research project, a community-based assignment, and a take-home final exam. |
| ASIANAM 151K | FILIPINO/AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | FUJITA-RONY, D. | (Same as History 152/Soc Sci 178K) This course will explore the history of Filipina/o Americans in the United States with particular focus on the twentieth century. Major topics will include colonialism, labor, migration, family, and culture. Requirements will include a five-page paper, a mid-term exam, and a final exam, as well as regular participation in section. |
| ASIANAM 161 | RACIAL/ETHNIC COMMUNITIES | LIU, J. | (Same as Soc Sci 175B) This course will examine how racial and ethnic communities are formed and maintained as well as under what conditions these communities will continue to exist. While the focus is primarily on various Asian American communities, a comparison will be made with African American and Latino communities. |
| ASIANAM 171 | PHILIPPINE HISTORY | WOODS, D. | (Same as Hist 175G) This course examines Philippine history from prehistory to the present, with an emphasis on the pre-Spanish and Spanish eras, as setting the stage for the American period and the movement to independence. The approach will be thematic, including examination of various aspects of Philippine culture and society, up to the events leading to the Revolution. From that point on, the study will focus on specific incidents and individuals. The course assignments and requirements will include two (2) map tests (scantron) and a midterm, and final exam, both essay in format. In addition, responses to the reading assignments (about 100 pages a week) in the form of journals will be assigned. |
| ASIANAM 171 | FILIPINO CULTURE/LITERATURE | ALCEDO, P. | “Philippine Culture Through Its Literary and Other Artistic Productions” will interrogate how Filipinos/as through the texts they produce and corporeally perform negotiate with power structures that define the practice of their everyday lives. Significant attention will be given to the role that traditional dances, beauty pageants, theater, film, and literature play in the shaping of a community’s cultural identity. This class will uniquely bring together the ability of literature and performance to both serve as a powerful lens through which the many facets of Philippine culture could be understood. It will be interdisciplinary in approach in that the course will draw its interpretive accounts of these literary and embodied texts through such disciplines as cultural anthropology, dance and performance studies, literary studies, history, and folklore. Students will have an opportunity to take a close look into fascinating materials like: a novel about what it means to grow up in a middle class family in the 1970s; an ethnography on the sinulog dancing of Cebu in the Central Philippines; a folklore account on Manila’s jeepneys; and an experimental documentary film about the 1992 Philippine national elections. The students will be required to take two essay exams, and a final paper that will explore one of the themes discussed in class. |
| ASIANAM 171A | COMPARATIVE INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION | LIU, J. | (Same as Sociol 179) This course exams key concepts in international migration through the study of Asian immigration to Australia, Canada, and the United States, primarily after World War II. Subjects to covered include international migration theory, diasporic perspectives, demographic composition and its ramifications, and multiculturalism. |