Global Arc

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.

From the height of the Asian American movement began at San Francisco State in 1968, the question of where Asian diasporic communities fit within the American racial matrix has been of pivotal interest for scholars, students, activists and artists across genres. This class seeks to explore Asian Americans' social location in the US. Using a relational intersectional feminist approach, this class will examine Asian Americans positionality in relation to Indigenous, Black and Latinx communities throughout the country. Students will engage and hone Asian American Studies interdisciplinary methods (historical, literary and filmic analysis).

This course will focus on the Asian American arts, culture and youth activist movements in New York City from the early 1970s-1990s. Invited guest speakers--filmmakers, visual and literary artists--will engage with students in talk-story, bridging their cultural practices to present day. We will examine how Asian Americans used their struggle for self-determination and talents to build art, literary and independent film organizations and the projects that they have produced. Students will have the opportunity to produce a creative final project based on oral history interviews with members of Asian American organizations.

In this seminar, students will have the opportunity to explore the diversity of Asian Pacific American cultures, their numerous representations and how APA cultural producers create multidimensional images and narratives. Throughout the semester, students will analyze social issues such as the culture wars, mainstreaming, branding, and centering the margins within mainstream, independent and alternative contexts through utilizing a wide range of film and television screenings; critical and fictional writing; blogs/vlogs; music; social media platforms; and interactions with professionals in film/television, literature, journalism and academia.