ENG 274 Asian American Literature
Who is Asian American? What is Asian Americanness? In this course, we will examine the category—“Asian American”—as a historical product rather than an immutable truth. We will read both sides of this hyphenated identity; tracing its creation and ongoing progress through the literature produced by Asian American authors. We will interrogate the external historical pressures like immigration legislation, decolonization, racial segregation, and language politics that created Asian American as a racial category as well as how individual authors and their communities responded to and transformed these pressures through their writing. The readings will include writers with origins in various parts of the world—Vietnam, India, Japan, Myanmar—and we will examine both the rich literary traditions that these authors draw on and what it means for all these diverse cultures to be brought under the umbrella of “Asian American.” The course will read “Asian American Literature” as an ongoing body of work that is constantly defining and redefining what it means to be Asian American.