ASAM1170 - Beyond "Hate": Violence in Asian American History

Since 2020, national media, political leaders, and nonprofit organizations have all called attention to a rise in what they labeled “anti-Asian hate.” But what does this framing of hate, and its centering of individual acts of hate violence, tell us about the roots of anti-Asian violence? This course takes recent attention to anti-Asian hate as a point of departure to investigate the history of anti-Asian violence as constitutive to the United States as a nation and an empire. Taking a historical and theoretical approach to the concept of violence, we will consider why certain forms of violence are privileged and others silenced within conversations about racial violence. Through a range of historical, cultural, and scholarly texts, students will examine different genres of violence throughout Asian American history, including state, imperial, gender-based, and hate violence. From 19th century lynchings of early Chinese migrants to post-9/11 Islamophobia, this course traces the function of violence as a tool for the racialization and disciplining of Asian bodies. At the same time, through engagements with postcolonial, Third World, feminist, and abolitionist theory, we will explore how Asian Americans have theorized, organized against, and been agents of violence themselves.