Fall 2009 Courses

This course will explore the varieties of Asian American Experience by considering the literary forms they take. Our readings will range from poems carved into the walls of a detention center at the beginning of the century to experiments in literary form in the eighties and nineties. The course will consider literary representations of a broad range of Asian American experience: tales of migratory labor, Chinatown stories, the extraordinary case of Japanese internment, panethnic activist literature, and the different accounts that emerge when Asian America expands beyond East Asia to include South and Southeast Asian American experience. In each instance, we will read these forms within their historical moments, ultimately asking how these formal expressions map onto the conditions of Asian America.

An introduction to the sociological studies of race and ethnicity in the U.S. and the differential educational and labor market outcomes.

This reading seminar will focus on how different groups of Asians interacted with each other in the context of earlytwentieth-century American society, especially in Hawaii and California. Such issues as ethnicity, complexity of racerelations (as opposed to conventional black-white binarism), and the intricate entanglements of class and race will also be examined.    

This course will examine how Asian Americans are represented by and relate to U.S. popular culture by examining specific examples of popular culture and grounding them in readings regarding culture, commodification, race and media, race relations, and citizenship studies. 

     This course investigates the everyday practices and customs of South Asians in America. Every immigrant group has itsown history, customs, beliefs and values, making each unique while simultaneously a part of the "melting pot" or saladbowl" of American society. Yet how do people define themselves and their ethnicities living in a diasporic context? Bytaking into account the burgeoning South Asian American population as our model, this course will explore the basicthemes surrounding the lives that immigrants are living in America, and more specifically the identity which the secondgeneration, born and/or raised in American, is developing. South Asians in the U.S. will be divided thematically coveringthe topics of ethnicity, marriage, gender, religion, and pop culture. Reading and assignments will discuss a variety ofissues and viewpoints that are a part of the fabric of South Asia, but will focus on the interpretation of such expressiveculture in the United States.

This course will delve into the continuing process of westward American expansion into the Pacific after the 1890s. Suchquestions as immigration, race relations, and diplomacy will be discussed in the class. Students who are interested inU.S.-Asia relations, Asian immigration, and histories of Hawaii and the Philippines as part of the American Empire areespecially encouraged to take this course.