The last few decades have seen mass migration and movement of people from one place to another: from South, East, and Southeast Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, from Central America in the 1990s, from Africa in 2000s, and in this decade from the Middle East. In Asia, as a result of human rights violations, North Koreans have fled to China, Tibetans to India, and over 3 million individuals fled Southeast Asia in the 1980s. More than one million refugees from Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, fled temporarily to Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, before resettling in the United States. Philadelphia is host to all of these communities. Some of our own students at Penn are 1st or 2nd generation South and Southeast Asian Americans. This course provides a comparative overview of the history, ethnicity, religion, and cultures of Southeast Asia (and the deep connections with South Asia and East Asia), and their human rights, temporary settlement, and treatment in host countries in the region. The first part of the course will use an international human rights framework to explore the human rights issues that forced people to flee from their countries of origin. The course will challenge and expand students' understandings of international human rights in the past and in the present with a focus on human rights violations such as: A. Vietnamese fleeing the war in Southeast Asia. B. North Koreans seeking refuge in China and in South Korea. C. Tibetans hoping for protection by crossing the border into India. Given the deep diplomatic and economic relations between Vietnam and India, this international portion of the course will highlight how the two countries in the region, an Asian communist country, and the other, an Asian democratic country handle human rights in similar and different ways. The second part of the course will pivot to the US and explore the civil rights of Asian Americans in the US such as the right to migrate, seek and enjoy asylum, education, housing, employment and health. The course will feature Penn professors as guest speakers so as to expose students to our own in-house experts, their fields and their departments. In addition, As part of a Asian American Studies, South Asia Center, Netter Center ABCS course, students will visit neighborhoods where Asian Americans live, work and play: South Asian neighborhoods in Jersey City, New Jersey; Korean neighborhoods in Olney; Vietnamese and Cambodian neighborhoods in South and West Philly.

This course explores the visual history of race in the United States as both self-fashioning and cultural mythology by examining the ways that conceptions of Native American, Latino, and Asian identity, alongside ideas of Blackness and Whiteness, have combined to create the various cultural ideologies of class, gender, and sexuality that remain evident in historical visual and material culture. We also investigate the ways that these creations have subsequently helped to launch new visual entertainments, including museum spectacles, blackface minstrelsy, and early film, from the colonial period through the 1940s.

This course examines the changing religious landscape of the United States through a focus on the religious life of Asian Americans. Through interdisciplinary texts and ethnographic field assignments, students will consider how religion and race intersect to inform notions of cultural and political citizenship, community, and culture. Topics to be explored include the impact of 9/11, religious political activism, and the appropriation and commodification of "Asian" religious practices.

Providing a broad introduction to the history of persons of Asian descent living in the United States, this course will specifically examine the Asian American & Pacific Islander American experience as told through the cinematic lens. Equal parts socio-political history and media studies, this course will comprehensively assess factors contributing to the historical under representation of AAPIs in mainstream American media. By contrast, the media texts that we study will reveal a cinematic history that runs parallel to the mainstream, consisting of independently produced films created by and/or starring AAPIs that feature authentic portrayals of the community they represent. Topics will include economics of film production, broadcast television ratings, film festivals as a mechanism of distribution, negative stereotyping, Hollywood whitewashing, cultural appropriation, and media activism.

Topics vary. Please see our website for more current information: asam.sas.upenn.edu

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

According to the U.S. Census, there are approximately 21 million Asian residents in the U.S. that comprise almost 6 percent of the total population. This relatively small number disguises the critical experiences Asian American communities face in both the local and transnational context. Yet, Asian Americans constitute one of the most heterogeneous racial groups within the U.S. Over the course of this semester we will read about and actively discuss the history of Asian immigration to the U.S., the social construction and experience of race in the U.S., and the political, economic, and cultural contributions of Asian Americans. We will also examine how Asian Americans negotiate/deploy their culture and ethnicity to achieve recognition in multicultural America and how the construction of Asian American identity intersects with class, gender, and sexuality.

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.

This course provides an introduction to the history of Asian/Pacific Americans, focusing on the wide diversity of migrant experiences, as well as the continuing legacies of Orientalism on American-born APA's. Issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality will also be examined.

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.