Department of English

This course serves as a broad introduction to Asian American literature and culture in a national and global context. We will read novels, short stories, poems, and essays from a wide range of Asian American authors and critics. In addition, we will screen a number of films, documentaries, and videos about contemporary topics in the field. Throughout the semester we will pay particular attention to the ways in which gender, sexuality, and class underpin processes of Asian American immigration and racial formation and how, in turn, these processes frame the problem of the human and human rights in liberal modernity. In order to provide a more engaged political framework for analyzing both the material histories and the psychic lives of Asian Americans, we will read a number of legal documents and articles from critical race studies, critical theory, deconstruction, postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, and environmental studies. Short essay; final essay; final exam.