After Asian America

Undergraduate

Why does “Asian America” seem so 1968, a platform for political mobilization that’s hyperspecific to a particular time and place? Conversely, why does “Asian America” continue to be so elusive, a speculative identity that we’re still searching for? To be after Asian America is to feel nostalgia, embarrassment, desire, and frustration—perhaps all at once. To be after Asian America is to experience uncertainty about the object provoking such feelings. This course is “after Asian America” in all these ways. Through literary, aesthetic, cultural, and scholarly texts, we will develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing the range of identifications and disidentifications that inform Asian American culture, politics, and thought. In prioritizing temporal disorientation over historical chronology, this course shows how affect and sensation can surface alternate genealogies of power and difference. That is, our interest in the ambivalences of an already dated yet perpetually emergent racial formation will incite us to treat feeling as a vital form of knowledge about war, colonialism, capitalism, ecology, and being. While we will certainly discuss regimes of perception through primary and secondary texts, I hope we can also approach our own thinking, reading, speaking, and writing as collectively embodied and temporally contingent acts. WR , HU M 1:30pm-3:25pm