Stephen H. Sumida

Professor, American Ethnic Studies
Ph.D., University of Washington, 1982

Professional Biography

Prior to returning to the University of Washington where he earned his Ph.D. in English in 1982, Stephen H. Sumida taught in the Department of English Language and Literature and Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan (1990-1998), the Departments of Comparative American Cultures and English and the American Studies Program at Washington State University (1981-1990), and the English and American Studies Departments of the University of Hawaii (1970-1980). He committed his scholarship and teaching to Asian American literary studies in 1975, when he became the coordinator of the Pacific Northwest Asian American Writers' Conference, held at the University of Washington in 1976. He went on to be a co-founder of Talk Story Inc., a cultural organization for developing research, creativity, and study in Hawaii's literature and arts. This activity continues today in Hawai'i. From 1986 to 1990 Sumida was a member and chair of the Committee on the Literatures and Languages of America, of the Modern Language Association of America, where scholars in Native American, African American, Chicano/a, Puerto Rican, and Asian/Pacific American literatures, were among the first to construct a view of a multicultural American literature. Professor Lauro Flores of the University of Washington in turn was appointed to the Committee and chaired it. Sumida went on to serve as President of the Association for Asian American Studies and the American Studies Association. In 2007-2008 he was awarded a Fulbright Professorship to teach in Tokyo, at the distinguished Tsuda College and Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has participated in American Studies projects and given lectures widely around the world, in tune with his American Studies Association presidential themes of a respect for international scholarship in the field and constant attention to how internationalism and US ethnic studies impact each other.

Selected Publications

A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature. Co-edited with Sau-ling Cynthia Wong. New York: Modern Language Association, 2001.

*And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai´i. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991.

*Winner of the Cultural Studies Book Award of the Association for Asian American Studies, 1992

Asian American Literature of Hawaii: An Annotated Bibliography. Co-authored with Arnold T. Hiura. Honolulu: Japanese American Research Center and the Hawaii Ethnic Resources Center: Talk Story, Inc., 1979.

Articles and book chapters by Steve Sumida have appeared in many publications, among them the Journal of Asian American Studies, American Literature, Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers' Quarterly, Women's Studies, American Studies International, Journal of American Studies (of the American Studies Association of Korea), Pacific and American Studies (the journal of the Center for Pacific and American Studies of the University of Tokyo), American Quarterly, An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, Reading the Literatures of Asian America, Growing Up Asian American, and a volume on intergroup dialogue.

Teaching and Research Interests

Asian/Pacific American literature and interdisciplinary studies; comparative American ethnic literatures; interdisciplinary American Studies.

Courses

Since coming to the UW to teach in 1999, Sumida has regularly offered undergraduate courses in Hawaii's Literatures and Asian American Theater, both of them described below. He has also taught AES 212: Comparative American Ethnic Literature and a course on Asian American literary history.

Hawaii's Literatures (AAS 320) : A course based on the active and critical reading, listening to, viewing, analyzing, interpreting, and discussing of selected works of Native Hawaiian and multicultural literatures of Hawai´i, or both oral and written arts. We examine literary and other cultural expressions of Hawai´i in historical contexts, not only for how contexts and their interplay may affect our understandings but also for how literary works and their creators interpret and present history. In our study we try to comprehend changes that have occurred over the course of more than two centuries while Hawai´i went from being a recognized, sovereign nation to being a colony of the United States, as presented in Hawaii's literatures and histories. Our course is patterned on a trajectory of study from Native Hawaiian, through plantation, to "Local" constructs of culture and the issues raised in literature concerning this pattern. (Writers studied in this course include: Lili´uokalani, composers of Hawaiian mele (songs, lyrics, poetry), John Dominis Holt, Milton Murayama, Gary Pak, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, and others.)

Asian American Theater (AAS 330): A study of selected dramas in Asian American literature, this course aims to set the stage for as intensive and comprehensive an experience with plays as reading (including dramatic readings) and critical discussion will allow us during the quarter. The course is the stage. We are the players. In this experience we each shall try out skills and methods of interpretation such as dramaturgy and the setting of dramas in their historical contexts. We shall analyze subtexts and the conventions of drama working in the plays. We shall perform creative acts of acting and directing, again within constraints of the classroom and quarter. (Playwrights in this course include: Genny Lim, Momoko Iko, Wakako Yamauchi, Frank Chin, Velina Hasu Houston, Jeannie Barroga, David Henry Hwang, Elizabeth Wong, Philip Kan Gotanda, and Chay Yew.)

Contemporary Asian American Literature (AAS 402): In this course the study of major works especially of the last half of the twentieth century and first decade of the twenty-first is based on histories and historical contexts that the literary works invoke and that the authors interpret and reinterpret in order to show readers something about American selves, society, race, gender, and ethnicity as these continually take shape in a flow and turbulence of history and story. Works studied range from Carlos Bulosan's great America Is in the Heart and John Okada's novel of Seattle, No-No Boy, to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, to Sung Rno's Cleveland Raining, and Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer Prize winner, Interpreter of Maladies.

Graduate Courses

Professor Sumida offers the following three courses, when scheduling permits, under English 535 (generically titled American Culture and Criticism).

Paradigm Shifts in Asian American Literature: This course is a study of Asian/Pacific American literature examined at least three ways: as a literature of immigration; as a literature of diaspora; and as an indigenous literature. The course is also a study of how these paradigms may be related to one another as well as to other literatures in American culture.

Critical Issues in Asian American Literature: Asian American literature became named as such at a critical time, the early 1970s, and it has continued to be a site not merely of "contestation" but of conflict, controversy, raucousness, mischief, mean spirit, and capaciousness, generosity, and other attempts to counteract meanness. In this seminar we shall study highly select critical issues and move on to thrashing out others as interest directs us: the androcentricity of Asian American literature in the so-called cultural nationalist phase and the anthologizing or canon-formation in the early 1970s; the critical impact of Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior; furors and defenses concerning the hot properties, Amy Tan and David Henry Hwang; the denigration of "dead yellow men" in Asian American literature; the local, national, and international controversy over writings of Lois-Ann Yamanaka, issues of representation, and the alleged racist stereotyping of Asian Americans in Asian American literature.

Colonialism and Asian/Pacific American Literature: We will compare the colonizations of Hawai´i and the Philippines, both of which occurred in 1898 though by different, related means, to frame our study of literature that reflects and interprets the takeovers of these territories by the United States. The comparisons may also extend to the conduct of imperialism elsewhere in the world during the historical periods covered by our texts. The texts-some of them in full, some in excerpt form-include Lili´uokalani's Hawaii's Story; John Dominis Holt's Waimea Summer; Haunani-Kay Trask's From a Native Daughter; R. Zamora Linmark's Rolling the R's; and Gary Pak's A Rice Paper Airplane, on the Hawai´i side of the comparison. The Philippine connection comes through articles in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, editors, Cultures of United States Imperialism, which contextualizes some of the work of the seminar; N. V. M. Gonzalez's The Bread of Salt and Other Stories; Ninotchka Rosca's State of War; Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters; Peter Bacho's Cebu; and essays by E. San Juan, Jr.