Courses for Spring 2021

	Title	Instructors	Location	Time	Description	Cross listings	Fulfills	Registration notes	Syllabus	Syllabus URL
ASAM 104-401	Asian Am Community: Asian American Community	Fariha Khan		TR 12:00 PM-01:20 PM	Who is Asian American and how and where do we recognize Asian America? This interdisciplinary course explores the multiple factors that define Asian American identity and community. In order to provide a sketch of the multifacted experience of this growing minority group, we will discuss a wide variety of texts from scholarly, artistic, and popular (film, cinematic) sources that mark key moments in the cultural history of Asia America. The course will address major themes of community life including migration history, Asian American as model minority, race, class, and transnational scope of Asian America. In combination with the readings, this class will foster and promote independent research based on site visits to various Asian American communities in Philadelphia and will host community leaders as guest lecturers.	URBS207401, SAST113401	Cultural Diversity in the US	Course Online: Synchronous Format		https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2021A&course=ASAM104401
ASAM 110-301	Asian American Activism	Robert V Buscher		M 04:30 PM-07:30 PM	Please see our website for more current information: asam.sas.upenn.edu			Crse Online: Sync & Async Components		https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2021A&course=ASAM110301
ASAM 120-301	Asian Am Pop Culture: Asian American Popular Culture	Peter T Van Do		TR 04:30 PM-06:00 PM	This course will examine the ways in which Asian Americans have constituted and positioned their identities through various mediums of popular culture, community building and activism. First, students will become familiar with major concepts relating to Popular Culture, Cultural Studies, and Asian American Cultural Studies. Second, students will have a deeper understanding of the Asian American Movement. Third, students will make connections between representations and dominant images of Asian Americans within various mediums.		Cultural Diversity in the US	Course Online: Synchronous Format		https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2021A&course=ASAM120301
ASAM 165-401	The Asian Caribbean	Rupa Pillai		TR 03:00 PM-04:30 PM	This course complicates prevailing understandings of the Caribbean and extends the boundaries of Asian America by exploring the histories, experiences, and contributions of Asians in the Caribbean. In particular, we will focus on the migrations of Chinese and Indian individuals to Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica, and Guyana as well as how their descendants are immigrating to the United States. We will examine the legal and social debates surrounding their labor in the 19th century, how they participated in the decolonization of the region, and how their migration to the United States complicates our understandings of ethnicity and race. Ultimately, through our comparative race approach, we will appreciate that the Caribbean is more than the Black Caribbean, it is also the Asian Caribbean.	LALS165401, SAST166401, GSWS165401	Cultural Diversity in the US	Crse Online: Sync & Async Components		https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2021A&course=ASAM165401
ASAM 202-401	Tpcs Asian American Lit	David L Eng		T 01:30 PM-04:30 PM	Topics vary. Please see our website for more current information: asam.sas.upenn.edu	ENGL272401		Course Online: Synchronous Format
ASAM 215-401	Asian Am Gendersexuality: Asian American Gender and Sexuality	Rupa Pillai		TR 10:30 AM-12:00 PM	This course explores the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race in Asian America. Through interdisciplinary and cultural texts, students will consider how Asian American gender and sexualities are constructed in relation to racism while learning theories on and methods to study gender, sex, and race. We will discuss masculinities, femininities, race-conscious feminisms, LGBTQ+ identities, interracial and intraracial relationships, and kinship structures.	SAST215401, GSWS215401	Cultural Diversity in the US	Course Online: Synchronous Format		https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2021A&course=ASAM215401
ASAM 220-401	Asian American Women: Asian American Women: Nation, Self, Identity	Raili Roy		W 02:00 PM-05:00 PM	This course examines the literary constructions of Asian American Womens' identity in relation to the U.S. nation state. How have the figures of the tiger mother, the Asian nerd, the rice queen, the trafficked woman, the geisha, the war bride, emerged to represent Asian American women, and how have Asian American feminists responded to these problematic racial stereotypes? How does the scholarship on such racialized representations illuminate historical and contemporary configurations of gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, citizenship, migration, empire, war, neoliberalism and globalization as they relate to the lives of Asian American women? In exploring these questions, this course examines Asian American histories, bodies, identities, diasporic communities, representations, and politics through multi- and interdisciplinary approaches, including social science research, literature, popular representations, film, poetry and art.	SAST221401, GSWS220401	Cultural Diversity in the US	Crse Online: Sync & Async Components
ASAM 239-401	Migration & Middle East	Heather Sharkey		T 01:30 PM-04:30 PM	This reading-and discussion-intensive seminar examines the phenomenon of migration into, out of, within, and across the Middle East and North Africa. We will focus on the period from the late nineteenth century to the present, and will emphasize the cultural (rather than economic) consequences of migration. Along the way we will trace connections between the Middle East and other regions-- notably the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, the Caucasus, and Western Europe. Readings are interdisciplinary and include works of history, anthropology, sociology, medical research, literature, political science, geography, and human rights advocacy. As students develop final projects on topics of their choice, we will spend time throughout the semester discussing tactics for research and writing.	SAST269401, NELC239401, NELC539401		Course Online: Synchronous Format		https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2021A&course=ASAM239401
ASAM 313-401	The Chinese Body (SNF Paidea Program Course)	Kenneth Robert Lum Amrita Corinne Stuetzle		CANCELED	This course looks at representations of the Chinese (and Asian body) since the Limehouse district in East London and the advent of Chinese contract laborers to the Americas in the 19th century. The localization of the Chinese throughout the Americas within Chinatown precincts were also subject to representational imaginings that were negotiated through the lens of civic planning, literature and later in cinema. Chinatowns are ultimately a product of racism. They were created as a political and social support system for newly arrived Chinese immigrants. While Chinese laborers arrived into the United States in 1840 and in significant numbers into Canada about 1860, Chinese contract workers were encouraged to immigrate to the Americas as an inexpensive source of labor, especially after the end of the American Civil War. Industrial leaders in America, Canada and elsewhere in the Americas (Mexico, Cuba, Peru, etc) saw the arrival of Chinese workers as a victory for commercial interests. However, the celebration was short-lived, as anti-Chinese sentiment quickly transformed into anti-Chinese hysteria. Rather than attacking the vested interests that exploit foreign labor as embodied by the Chinese worker, racist unions with the cooperation of civic leaders and the police deemed it safer to burn Chinatowns than capitalist property. Deeply under-studied to this day is the number of mass murders of Chinese workers in the 19th century by anti-Chinese thugs. This seminar will focus in on how the body of the Chinese (and Asian) was imagined and reimagined multiple times from the middle of the 19th century to today.	FNAR313401, FNAR613401		Permission Needed From Instructor Designated SNF Paideia Program Course