ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

This course investigates “Asian American” literature as a nexus of two larger social forces: (1) migration, as a lens to investigate xenophobia, nationalism, settler violence, and working class struggle; and (2) imperialism, often a driving force that unleashes the travelers and refugees that comprise the former category. Adopting a heavily historical emphasis that will use Asian American identity as a lens to examine migration and imperialism, this course seeks to destabilize all three terms in its title: Asian, American, and literature. Students will (1) conduct an oral history with an Asian American or immigrant subject, (2) research Asian American little magazines and create a response on their own; and (3) write a final term paper. We will read many texts that are primary sources such as movement journals and little magazines and oral histories as well as other non-literary sources (e.g., Supreme Court decisions, pamphlets and op-eds for and against Chinese exclusion, letters from the Ghadar party of Sikh and Punjabi anti-colonialists, an audio recording of a South Asian woman who traveled on the Komagata Maru, demands from the Third World Liberation Front).

We will read documents from the Chinese exclusion period alongside Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men and the poems written by migrants detained at Angel Island—a theme of incarceration that we will pick up in reading about Japanese American incarceration. Other texts will explore proletarian power, such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is In The Heart and Sujatha Gidla’s An Ant Among Elephants, or the American wars in Asia, such as Richard E. Kim’s The Martyred. Some writers will come from the boundaries of a Pan-Asian American identity, such as Arab modernist Ameen Rihani, or not be written by “Asian Americans” at all, such as the memoir of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man detained at Guantánamo Bay.