Introduction to Asian American Literature

This course serves as an introduction to the critical study of Asian American literature and culture. Using a selection of key literary texts in the field as well as texts by emergent authors, critics, and filmmakers, we will examine the multiple and often contesting subjectivities that take shape under the rubric of “Asian American.” Our close readings will attend to how literary texts make productive use of the intersections and interstices of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality in order to represent and revise various Asian American identities. The course aims to foreground the question of literature’s role in subject formation. How does the text not only represent or express identity, but produce it? How do these texts figure identity not ontologically—as a thing one can simply be—but as a field of relationships and experiences that is constantly questioned, contested, negotiated, rewritten? What can Asian American literature teach us about the meaning of, the making of, the “American”?

Requirements: Regular participation in class discussion; 3 short papers (2-3pp); one longer essay (5-7pp); midterm quiz; take-home final.

Texts may include:
Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters
Gish Jen, Typical American
Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men
Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s
John Okada, No-No Boy
Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker
Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine
Shyam Selvadurai, Funny Boy
Le Thi Diem Thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For
Selected poetry (John Yau, Paisley Rekdal, Jessica Hagedorn, Lee Young-Li)

Films:
I’m The One That I Want
Banana Split: 25 Stories by Kip Fulbeck
Saving Face