Global Arc

What does a minor and shallow category like "cuteness" have to do with the abject histories of race and gender? This course offers an introduction to key terms in Asian American Studies through the lens of the seemingly insatiable American appetite for "Asian cuteness." How do we reconcile this desire with the long history of anti-Asian sentiments in this country? Why aren't other races "cute"? We will explore cuteness as racial and gendered embodiment, commodity, globalization, aesthetics, affect, and politics. Above all, we explore the implications of understanding race as a style.

This course will analyze and evaluate through a psychological lens the psychosocial causes and consequences of significant current events that impact different Asian groups in the U.S., such as pandemic-spurred anti-Asian sentiment and educational policy (e.g., the debate over magnet schools moving to lottery systems rather than test based), as well as long-standing "everyday" experiences common to Asian Americans (e.g., navigating biculturalism, microaggressions and model minority stereotypes) that may impact identity and mental health.

Asian Americans have experienced a long history of contestation regarding gender and sexuality. To examine this saga, we will begin with Black and Asian feminist critiques of normative gender and sexuality. We will then turn to sociocultural history, analyzing legal cases policing intimacy, and the construction of the gendered and sexualized Asian woman in late 19th C. San Francisco. We will then examine histories of normative forms of sexuality, politics and social worlds of queer and trans communities, gendered labor, representation and the post-911 era.

Where did the stereotype of Asian Americans as model minorities--overachieving whiz kids, industrious workers, "tiger mothers," "crazy rich" Asians--come from? What accounts for the model minority myth's persistence today? How has its representational scheme changed over time? Does model minoritism have a literary (and not only social) history? By reading across fiction, visual culture, and economic history, this seminar traces the changing definitions of Asians in the US from "yellow peril" to model minorities: from the myth's wartime origins, to the birth of American neoliberalism, and onward to the global rise of Asia in the 21st century.

This class attempts to square the circle by using Asian American autobiographies as a lens through which to understand immigration and colonial history, and connect them to contemporary projects of Asian American political mobilization. While Asian American autobiography can serve as a way to translate one's assimilation into American nationhood, this course seeks to destabilize all three terms in its title. We will read texts not intended as literary, transnational works that challenge what it means to be "American" literature; and others texts by authors at the boundaries of a Pan-Asian identity, such as Arab and Indo Caribbean writers.

"Identity politics" has become a derogatory term across the political left and right to name divergent ills shaping contemporary US political culture. Yet present usages stem far from those of the Black queer feminists/socialists who coined the term in 1977. Why have "identity politics" become such a malleable anti-hero? How do Asian Americans figure in these debates? Through the work of Black feminists, postcolonial theorists, and activists, we will explore the liberatory and fraught nature of identity-based movement, tracing how negotiations of difference across gender, racialization, immigration status, and ability shape political culture.

Since the recent election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the question of who belongs has become central to South Asian politics. These questions of power and belonging reverberate in the diaspora. Because the US is a settler-colonial state, many South Asians find themselves at the interstices of American and South Asian systems of power and flows of capital. In order to examine these processes, this class will use interdisciplinary thematic units across South Asian and Asian American Studies to examine caste, race/racialization, gender/gendering processes and colonialism in the Indian American diaspora.

This seminar examines the emergence and transformation of the Asian American family as a social form. We will investigate how US labor demands and legal restrictions on immigration and citizenship militated against the formation of Asian American families, and how paper sons, military wives, refugees, adoptees, and LGBT family experiences eluded norms of kinship. We will also study the significance of the intergenerational trope in Asian American literature, and how writers responded to neoliberalism's remaking of the "Asian" family according to the model minority myth.

This course uses major studies of affect as a lens through which to view Asian American literary texts. At the same time, it reads Asian American literary texts as interventions in affect theory. Are there distinctively Asian American modes of affect? Asian American structures of feeling? If so, what ethical and representational dilemmas do they present? What political and aesthetic possibilities do they open up? How have they been shaped by histories of traumatic dislocation, exile, incarceration, and racialization? How do they condition the experience of temporality? What futures might they enable?

Debates over policing, immigration, and affirmative action routinely position Black and Asian communities on opposing sides, while the model minority myth has been redeployed in the twenty-first century in the form of the Tiger Mom. How did we get here, and what do these trends mean for our daily lives? We respond to these questions by looking at fiction, film, and foodways from the last 30 years of Black-Asian relations in America. Using a comparative race and ethnic studies approach, we identify ways of thinking and talking about interracial difference that forge new paths for social, cultural, and political engagement.