Native American Lit

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

In her book The Melancholy of Race Anne Cheng observes, “Asian Americans have come to occupy a curious place in the American racial imaginary, embodying both delight and repugnance.” In this course we will examine how Asian Americans have contradictorily been rendered both highly visible and strangely invisible through US culture, history, and the law. Beginning with anti-Asian movements and legislation in the nineteenth century, we will move through different forms of Asian American racialization: the Chinese coolie, the Japanese enemy, the Filipinx colonial subject, the Southeast Asian refugee, the 1992 Koreatown business owner, the South Asian immigrant, the Asian transnational, and the Asian American model minority. Examining dominant narratives of Asians in the United States as well as Asian American cultural and identity formation, this course introduces students to the moments, conflicts, and movements that constitute the field of Asian American Studies.