Department of English

This course serves as a broad introduction to Asian American literature and culture in a national as well as global context.  We will read novels, short stories, and essays from a wide range of Asian American authors.  In addition, we will screen a number of films by contemporary Asian American and Asian diasporic directors.  Throughout the semester we will pay particular attention to the ways in which gender, sexuality, and class underpin processes of Asian American racial formation.  In order to provide a more engaged political framework for analyzing both the material and the psychic processes of Asian American immigration and assimilation, we will read a number of legal documents and theoretical works from psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and critical race studies.