The goal of this course will be to build upon and re-cast research areas in Asian American and Asian Diasporic Studies in order to address the current intellectual, artistic, political and demographic transformations that have rendered anew the objects and methods of these fields in the last decade. Located at the intersection of the principal political, economic, and cultural forces of the U.S. nation-state and the set of international political economic conditions that are generally bundled together under the name of Globalization, Asian American Studies and metropolitan diasporic studies, like other interdisciplinary endeavors, have in the last decade been engaged in critical conversations about the nature and context of their inquiry, their objects and methods of study, their institutionalization, and their changing political constituencies. We will study, absorb and critically reflect on a set of methodologies (in particular neo-marxist critiques or race, postscolonial cultural studies, and comparative modernity studies) that have been most effective in dislocating the regulative "national biases" that have historically organized Asian American Studies and other fields of interdisciplinary critique. In naming these earlier modes of experiencing, apprehending and discoursing on the objects of Asian American Studies as constitutive of a "national bias" in the scholarly work, we mean more than the general critique of exclusionary gender and sexual politics of Asian American cultural nationalism that have become a popular node of discussion and dissent within and outside the field of Asian American and Ethnic Studies. By national bias we also mean to highlight the degree to which our methods of teaching and situating Asian American and Asian diasporic history and cultural production continue to "cast" Asian racialization within a national frame that stresses continuity, synthesis and identity (Lowe 1997).

Breaking from the national epistemological structure that has thus far constituted Asian American Studies, one could say broadly that our inquiry hopes also to pursue in a located and substantive though necessarily partial manner what has come to be known as Post-Nationalist critique, if that critique is to be understood not as the rejection of the study of the nation as a constitutive and regulative set of constraints but its rigorous and politically necessary supplementation. In this way, while our focus is exclusively in re-thinking the methods and objects of Asian American and Asian diasporic studies, the form of epistemological critique we seek to pursue exceeds the parameters of Asian Americanist inquiry. Hence, our readings will be culled from both within and outside the fields of Asian American and Asian diasporic studies. We will read both contemporary scholarship and important "foundational" essays (such as Marx's "On the Jewish Question").

Attn: This class will presume that you have some advanced knowledge of and are working in one or more of the following fields: Asian American studies, Asian disapora studies, and postcolonial metropolitan studies.

Because this course will pursue a certain imminent critique from within these fields, it is not suitable for students looking for a general introduction to these fields. Each student will be required to present a research perspectus to the entire class beginning in the eighth week. The perspectus should be based upon on-going research in one of the above mentioned fields. If you are not sure that this class is appropriate for you, please contact the instructor (ccreddy@u.washington.edu) before signing up. Finally, this class is part of a linked two-quarter "methods" course in Asian American and Asian diasporic studies. The second quarter of the class will be taught by Professor Moon-ho Jung (Dept. of History), focusing more specially on question of history and historiography relating to the study of racialized capitalism. Students are encouraged (though not required) to take both quarters of the course.