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In/Visible: Asian American Cultural Critique

ENGL 2272.401
also offered as: ARTH 3749, ASAM 2272, GSWS 2272
instructor(s):
Wednesday 1:45-4:44pm

In this interdisciplinary class, we will examine how the vibrant lived experience of Asian American immigrant groups across race and national origin, language and class, religion and sexuality exceed such dominant frameworks of representation. Asian American scholars, writers, and artists have consistently produced cultural works that challenge assimilationist narratives of representation, and that create new futures of Asian America. We will bring critical theories of race and ethnicity together with a wide range of textural forms: literature, photography, performance, food, ethnography and visual cultures. Our objective is to consider aesthetic modes of representation that move beyond notions of Asian American invisibility or visibility. We will explore how the dynamic forms of difference that characterize Asian American identities and communities demand new frameworks of representation: ways of seeing, thinking, and writing about Asian America that challenge our perceptions of the relation between race, identity, and citizenship.

English Major Requirements
  • Sector 1 Theory and Poetics (AETP)
  • Sector 2 Difference and Diaspora (AEDD)
English Concentration Attributes
  • Gender/Sexuality Concentration (AEGS)
  • Theory & Cultural Studies Concentration (AETC)
College Attributes
  • Foundational Approach: Cultural Diversity in US (AUCD)