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Sanda Lwin: Visiting Faculty 1999-2000

Professor Lwin joins CISA as Visiting Faculty for 1999-2000. She recently completed her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature under the guidance of Gayatri Spivak at Columbia University. Her dissertation, "Color-Lines: The Constitution of Asian America in Literature and Law," analyzes the racial formation of Asian America through intertextual readings of literary and legal narratives of citizenship, immigration and exile. As Visiting Faculty, Sanda will give an informal talk early in the Fall semester. She will teach two courses in the Department of English at the University, where she is based, and a course each at Mt. Holyoke and Smith Colleges. Courses: ENGL 891, UMass Amherst, Fall 1999: "Asian Diasporic Writing in America" - This graduate course focuses on literatures by writers from different Asian diasporic groups in a wide variety of places, including the United States, Canada, the Carribean and South America. The course also explores the mapping of the entity called "Asian America" through theoretical readings drawn from post-colonial, ethnic, and cultural studies. ENGL 273/AMSTUD 250/WOST 203, Sect 2., Mount Holyoke College, Fall 1999: "Asian-American Women Writers" - This undergraduate course explores the politics of race and gender through a variety of writings by women of Asian descent in North America. We will examine texts from a range of national and diasporic formations: U.S., Canada, South America, South Asian, South-East Asian, East Asian and Pacific Islander. Primary themes include conceptions of home, memory, race and sexuality, gender and nationalism, strategies of resistance, legacies of colonialism, war and immigrant displacement. ENGL & Legal Studies, UMass Amherst, Spring 2000: "Legal Fictions" - This undergraduate course examines racial formation in the United States -- a phenomenon Mark Twain referred to as 'the fiction of law and custom' -- through twentieth century literary and legal narratives. In particular, the course examines the relationship between law and literature, and investigates the ways in which the law teaches us to visualize racial identity. Smith College, Spring 2000: "Asian Diasporic Writing" - This undergraduate course explores Asian diasporic writing taking place across the Americas, including the United States, Canada, the Carribean and South America. Exploring the ways in which "Asian America" is constituted through literature, the course explores linkages between legacies of colonialism in Asian and immigrant displacement in the Americas.