Courses for Spring 2022

	Title	Instructors	Location	Time	Description	Cross listings	Fulfills	Registration notes	Syllabus	Syllabus URL
ASAM 002-401	Asian-American Lit	David L Eng	BENN 231	TR 01:45 PM-03:15 PM	An overview of Asian American literature from its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century to the present. This course covers a wide range of Asian American novels, plays, and poems, situating them in the contexts of Asian American history and minority communities and considering the variety of formal strategies these different texts take.	ENGL072401	Arts & Letters Sector Cultural Diversity in the US
ASAM 006-401	Race & Ethnic Relations	Tukufu Zuberi	MCNB 410	W 01:45 PM-04:45 PM	This course will focus on race and ethnicty in the United States. We begin with a brief history of racial categorization and immigration to the U.S. The course continues by examining a number of topics including racial and ethnic identity, interracial and interethnic friendships and marriage, racial attitudes, mass media iages, residential segregation, educational stritification, and labot market outcomes. The course will inlcude discussions of African Americans, Whites, Hispanics, Asian Ameriacns, and multiracials.	SOCI006401, AFRC006401, URBS160401	Cultural Diversity in the US
ASAM 110-301	Asian American Activism	Robert V Buscher	WILL 315	M 05:15 PM-08:15 PM	Please see our website for more current information: asam.sas.upenn.edu					https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2022A&course=ASAM110301
ASAM 115-401	American Race: A Philadelphia Story (SNF Paideia Program Course)	Fariha Khan	MCNB 286-7	TR 12:00 PM-01:30 PM	This course proposes an examination of race with a two-pronged approach: one that broadly links the study of race in the United States with a multi-disciplinary approach and also simultaneously situates specific conversations within the immediate location of Philadelphia, home to the University. The broad historical examination advances key concepts of race and racialization, explores key theoretical methodologies, and highlights major scholarly works. For example, students will engage with the study of race through Africana Studies, Asian American Studies, and through Latin American & Latinx Studies. Readings and methodologies will introduce students to critical issues in education, in literature, in sociology, and with methods in oral history, archival work, and ethnography. Most importantly, this extensive approach highlights the impact of race across multiple communities including Black Americans, immigrant populations, and communities that are marginalized to emphasize connections, relationships, and shared solidarity. Students are intellectually pushed to see the linkages and the impacts of racism across and among all Americans historically and presently. As each theme is introduced a direct example from Philadelphia will be discussed. The combination of the national discourse on race, with an intimate perspective from the City of Philadelphia, engages students both intellectually and civically. The course will be led by Fariha Khan but guest instructors with varied disciplinary backgrounds and guest speakers from local community organizations. Each instructor not only brings specific disciplinary expertise, but also varied community engagement experience.	URBS115401, SOCI115401, SAST115401, LALS115401		Designated SNF Paideia Program Course		https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2022A&course=ASAM115401
ASAM 120-301	Asian Am Pop Culture: Asian American Popular Culture	Peter T Van Do		TR 05:15 PM-06:45 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			https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2022A&course=ASAM120301
ASAM 130-301	Sonic Reverberation Asam: Sonic Reverberations of Asian America		DRLB 2N36	W 01:45 PM-03:45 PM	This is a course about music as sonic cultural practices of intercultural communication and as lived experience in which racial, ethnic, diasporic, religious, gendered, sexual, national identities are formed and transformed. This course specifically examines how various ideas and meanings of Asia America are enacted and embodied through music performances and other sonic practices. The course also considers how the production and consumption of Asian American as cultural difference through music and sound impacts the making and unmaking of multiculturalism and the American self. Topics will include questions about how music and sound is mobilized within the history and stories of Asian immigration and migration to the U.S.; the impact of the transnational circulation of Asian and Asian American music; representations of AAPs in popular culture; the potentials and limits of music to mitigate social and political problems encountered by Asian American communities; and community building through sonic encounters of Afro-Asian, Asian-Latinx and Caribbean, East Asian/South Asian American solidarities. Critical and reflexive theoretical approaches from ethnomusicology, anthropology, and performance studies, among other related disciplines, will be used to examine a range of styles and genres through close listening to assigned sound recordings and music ethnographies. No previous musical training is required for this course.
ASAM 165-401	The Asian Caribbean	Rupa Pillai	WILL 723	TR 03:30 PM-05:00 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.	GSWS165401, SAST166401, LALS165401	Cultural Diversity in the US
ASAM 202-401	Tpcs Asian American Lit				Topics vary. Please see our website for more current information: asam.sas.upenn.edu
ASAM 203-401	The Chinese Diaspora(S): Culture, Conflict, & Cuisine, 19c To the Present	Xia Yu	COHN 203	R 03:30 PM-06:30 PM	Topics vary. Please see our website for more current information: asam.sas.upenn.edu	HIST231401				https://pennintouchdaemon.apps.upenn.edu/pennInTouchProdDaemon/jsp/fast.do?webService=syllabus&term=2022A&course=ASAM203401
ASAM 215-401	Asian Am Gendersexuality: Asian American Gender and Sexuality	Rupa Pillai	WILL 306	TR 10:15 AM-11:45 AM	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.	GSWS215401, SAST215401	Cultural Diversity in the US
ASAM 239-401	Migration & Middle East				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.
ASAM 313-401	The Chinese Body (SNF Paideia Program Course)	Kenneth Robert Lum	ADDM 111	T 01:45 PM-04:45 PM	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		Designated SNF Paideia Program Course