| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|
| ASIANAM 60B | INTR ASIAN AM ST II | MIMURA, G. | (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 participation in discussion section. |
| ASIANAM 110 | LITERATURE BETWEEN WORLDS | RADHAKRISHNAN, R. | (Same as Comp Lit 104) Double-consciousness, Alienation, Ethnic hy-phenation, Marginality: these bitter sweet concepts will be among the recipes of our intellectual feast as we explore the phenomenon of \"between-ness.\" What is the relationship between home and location? What are the connections between: \"identity politics \"and \"the politics of representation? How do writers and artists who belong to more than one culture or history manage to give voice to the spaces of the \"between?\" Are these spaces comfortable or painful? How do Culture and System play a role in coordinating the space of the \"between?\" We shall be raising these questions symphonically as well as cacophonously as we look at the categories of nationality, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class, and their reciprocal interactions and interventions. We will be paying particular attention to the literary strategies that the writers of the \"between\" employ in their attempts to connect their political being with their aesthetic being, and their individual realities with collective possibilities. Texts will include Meena Alexander\'s Fault Lines, Amitav Ghosh\'s The Shadow Lines, Maxine Hong Kingston\'s The Woman Warrior, Nadine Gordimer\'s Burger’s Daughter, Tsitsi Dangarembga\'s Nervous Conditions, Gloria Anzaldua\'s Borderlands, and excerpts from Trinh Minh-ha\'s and Edward Said\'s theoretical works.
Welcome between, I mean aboard. |
| ASIANAM 111 | PACIFIC RIM: CHINA & CHINESE AMERICA | CHEN, Y. | (Same as Hist 190C) The Pacific Rim has become the center of gravity in our increasingly globalized world. Growing Sino-American interactions represent a vital part of what is going on in the Pacific Rim. And interactions have been of great significance for Chinese Americans, which is the focus of this class. In it, we will also try to gain a better understanding of globalization. Many experts have depicted globalization as a contemporary and economic development. But as we will learn from this class, globalization is a long historical process that involves political, cultural and other non-economic activities. We will discuss contemporary Sino-American interactions, and we will also trace their roots back to the 19th century. Topics include the following: pre-20th century contact between China and America; China\'s struggles in trying to remain relevant in early 20th-century world affairs and in dealing with its internal problems; turning points late in the 20th century; China\'s current economic, political and social interactions with the United States; the implications of such interactions for Chinese Americans; the concept of the diaspora and the changing meanings of being Chinese and American. We will look at important events and trends as well as case studies. In short, we will adopt a historically grounded and multidisciplinary approach in an effort to better understand changing relationships between the United States and China¬ a phenomenon that will help to define the 21st century. Grade is based on a short essay and a long essay. |
| ASIANAM 114 | SEXUALITY ASIAN AM FLM | 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 \"Good Woman of Bangkok\" we will examine the silences surrounding the representation of a sex worker and sex tourism in Thailand. Grades will be based on attendance and class participation, weekly journals, a midterm and a final essay. |
| ASIANAM 115 | ASIAN AM PERFORMANCE/WRITING | UYEHARA, D. | Participants will explore and create performance based on autobiographical and fictionalized story telling in the context of the Asian/Pacific American experience. Course includes ensemble and individual theater games, projects, as well as take-home assignments. Participants are encouraged to create truthful work from their unique perspective, work that does not fall back on convenient answers to race, class, and gender issues. Grades are based on weekly short presentations and discussions, assigned readings (Asian American performance, cultural studies, contemporary forms, theater technique, etc.), two essays, and one final presentation. Workshops led by performance artist and writer Denise Uyehara. No prerequisites necessary, but a willingness to learn and prompt attendance is mandatory. This is an intensive workshop, so be prepared to work hard and reap the benefits. |
| ASIANAM 132 | COMPARATIVE MINORITY POLITICS | TORRES, R. | (Same as Poli Sci 124/ChLat 147/AfAm 151) This course examines the political experiences of Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans in the United States in a comparative light. The course reaches back to the nineteenth century, but it focuses primarily upon the postwar period (roughly 1950 to the present). Central themes include the following: How have racial formation processes shaped the definition of each racial group as a political actor and the political opportunities and constraints facing each group? What moderate and radical political agendas have been articulated by each racial group? How has each racial group pursued empowerment through conventional political channels? Through extra-systemic means? With what success? What role does panethnicity play in facilitating collective political action within each group? How do transnational or diasporic identities shape racial politics within the United States? What happens when different group struggles for empowerment intersect or collide? |
| ASIANAM 151H | SOUTHEAST ASIAN AM EXPER | 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 151J | CHINESE AM EXPER | LIU, J. | (Same as Soc Sci 178J) This course examines the political economy of large-scale Chinese migration to the United States from the 1850s onward. Attention will focus on the patterns of Chinese migration and their ramifications for community development, economic participation, identity formation, and the articulation of racial issues within the U.S. legal/political system. The latter topic involves examining the experiences of Chinese Americans in relation to other Asian American groups and to non-Asian groups. As the course is interdisciplinary in focus, both social science/history and literary texts will be used. |
| ASIANAM 151k | FILIPINA/O AM EXPER | FUJITA-RONY, D. | (Same as History 152A/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 COMM | 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 165 | VIETNAMESE AM WOMEN | VO, L. | (Same as Soc Sci 177C/Women St 155) This course focuses on the historical and contemporary social, political, and economic experiences of Vietnamese women in America. We will analyze how larger sociopolitical forces have shaped their live, including colonization, imperialism, militarization, dislocation, and diaspora. Our discussions will center on how global and national constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality affect their predicament and status as war brides, international brides, international students, refugees, immigrants, Amerasians, and adoptees. The discussions will focus on how they negotiate their participation in the labor force, family relations, cultural representations, strategies of resistance, and the construction of their identities. |
| ASIANAM 200B | GRAD SEM CONTEMPORARY ISSUES | MIMURA, G. | (Same as Hist 202) 2005 marks the 50th anniversary of the famous Bandung conference that inaugurated the Nonaligned movement of the decolonizing \"Third World,\" which decisively recast race neither as a biological nor cultural condition, but as a political problem. Situating critical race theory in this legacy, this seminar will offer an account of race through its postcolonial and postnationalist revisions, their critiques, revisions and/or extensions of the Third Worldist idea. It will focus this inquiry on the revaluation of United States history pursued in American Studies, not as an isolated national formation but in the comparative, multiregional context of the Black Atlantic and the Asia Pacific. Throughout, and especially in the latter weeks, the seminar will consider in detail the interventions made by transnational feminism and queer of color critique. Course requirements include active participation in seminar discussions (20%); one in-class presentation with one or two partners on one week\'s readings (20%); and either weekly written responses or a seminar paper (60%).
REQUIRED BOOKS: Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin Manalansan, Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Laura Hyun-Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: En/figuring Asian American Women, Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Gary Okihiro, Common Ground: Reimagining American History, Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead, Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco\'s Chinatown, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
These readings will be supplemented by chapters, essays and articles by Chakrabarty, Derrida, Foucault, Gibson-Graham, Jameson, Verges and others. |
| ASIANAM 201 | COMPARATIVE INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION | LIU, J. | (Same as Sociol 259) This course examines 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 cover include international migration theory, diasporic perspectives, demographic composition and its ramifications, and multiculturalism. |