Critical Directions in Asian American Studies

This seminar will be an advanced seminar is Asian American Studies. The course is not an introduction to Asian Americanist methods, historiographies or canons. Rather, it is intended for graduate students actively pursuing an intervention in and contribution to Asian American Studies and who possess already a set of interests in or a project that they believe orchestrates an asian americanist intervention into social formations. We will read a number of works, focusing on the monograph form, that have transformed Asian American Studies and its points of intervention within the past decade or so. Topics include: diaspora, globalization, postcoloniality, environmental racism, transnational space economies, HIV/AIDS and gendered and sexual formations, comparative racializations, immigration, undocumented migration and refugee movements, war, orientalisms and area studies. Throughout, we will ask what kind of provisional coherency to Asian American Studies our investigations suggest. That is, we will not be content to examine particular instances of Asian American racialization across institutional contexts. We will also formulate a theoretical account of the kind of totality suggested by our investigation of the emergent processes and sites of asian differentiation and identity.

This course is, like Asian American Studies, part of a larger interdisciplinary conversation and endeavor. Hence, students are strongly encouraged to have taken Moon Ho Jung's Asian American historiography course or to take that course subsequent to this.