Asian American Avant-Gardes

This course explores Asian American avant-garde writing, performance, and visual art from the long twentieth century. We will begin with the historical avant-garde during the early twentieth-century Asian Exclusion era, before moving on to the Fluxus and Language writings of the 1960s-80s, and finally to the proliferation of experimental writing since the 1990s. Reading canonical and lesser-known works alongside criticism theorizing the avant-garde, we will pay particular attention to questions of literary and aesthetic form and their relationship to racial form. Authors include H.T. Tsiang, Jose Garcia Villa, Yoko Ono, Theresa Cha, Hualing Nieh, John Yau, Karen Tei Yamashita, Pamela Lu, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Bhanu Kapil, Tan Lin, Myung Mi Kim, Divya Victor, and Don Mee Choi. There will be opportunities for both critical and creative engagement with course material.