This seminar aims to provide students with a foundational knowledge of the emergence of ethnic enclaves and community-building patterns. We will use Chinatown as a case study to examine its formation and development, as well as the socioeconomic issues that arise within the community. Meanwhile, we will also learn about how the Chinese diaspora seeks to challenge racial segregation, clichés, and stereotypes through cross-cultural and interdisciplinary analysis.
What does it mean to be Asian American today? At once marginalized and woefully unspecific, Asian American identity seems to occupy a purgatorial status in the American racial imagination. How have Asian Americans been understood within, and how do they understand themselves within, white institutions, anti-black hierarchies, and capitalist orders? And what are the cumulative psychic effects of their quotidian, uneventful, and often unspoken racializations?
This course introduces students to foundational texts in Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. By emphasizing Asian American and Pacific Islander, this course foregrounds the “and” as a necessary tension between two groups that have been differently racialized. Some questions that will orient our engagement with these fields include: How does literature shape ideas about what it means to be Asian American or Pacific Islander? What is the role of discourse in (en)gendering ideas about East/West, Asia, the Pacific, and Otherness?
In this course, we will consider “play” as a distinct mode of media consumption and video games as a unique medium through which to encounter shared concerns of literary and media studies: narrative, character development, rhetoric, morality, and identity. Along the way, this course will introduce students to key debates in the scholarly study of video games.
(Offered as AAPI 269). This course will analyze the history, content, and implications of how Asian Americans have been portrayed and represented in mainstream U.S. media and popular culture. Using readings, class discussions, films & videos, and student-designed projects, this course gives students the opportunity to explore the visual dimensions and political, economic, and cultural dynamics of specific examples such as racial discrimination, anti-immigrant nativism, gender representations, whitewashing and erasure, and global influences like anime and K-Pop, etc.
Offered as HIST-253[AS/US/TC/TE/TR/TS] and AAPI-253. This is an introductory survey course on the history of Asian/Pacific/Americans (A/P/A) within the broader historical context of imperialism in the Asia-Pacific region. We will compare and contrast the historical experiences of specific groups of the A/P/A community; namely, those of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Southeast Asian (Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Hmong), Asian Indian, and Pacific Islander descent. The first half of the course examines the U.S.
