APIA 405 - Transnational Asian American Literature

Credits: (3)
College Curriculum: COLL 200
Domain (Anchored): ALV
Additional Domain (if applicable): CSI
Through the use of fictional and other texts, this course will examine how the Asian American is constructed in literary settings that situate this subject in multiple worlds. At several turns the model minority, the perpetual foreigner, or terrorist, how does the Asian American figure in various transnational contexts as represented by fiction? This course will analyze the intersectional constructs of race, gender, class, and sexuality in investigating how Asian Americanness is constituted within and against the concept of the nation. In so doing, the focus will be on texts that engage with colonialism, (im)migration, diaspora, and globalization as markers of identity in perpetual flux. Accordingly, we will attend to how literature characterizes the subjectivity of Asian Americans within the United States as simultaneously American and Other. At the same time, we will also scrutinize how Asian Americanness functions transnationally in literary depictions of racial and national identity at the margins of, and across, notions of inclusion and exclusion. (This course is anchored in the ALV and CSI domains.)
Cross-listed with: ENGL 371A