Department of English

This course will explore the varieties of Asian American experience by considering the literary forms they take. Our readings will range from poems carved into the walls of a detention center at the beginning of the century to experiments in literary form in the eighties and nineties. The course will consider literary representations of a broad range of Asian American experience: tales of migratory labor, Chinatown stories, the extraordinary case of Japanese internment, panethnic activist literature, and the different accounts that emerge when Asian America expands beyond East Asia to include South and Southeast Asian American experience. In each instance, we will read these forms within their historical moments, ultimately asking how these formal expressions map onto the conditions of Asian America. Course requirements: short writing assignments, midterm exam, final paper.