CAST 248 - Asian American Reckonings: An Introduction to Asian American Studies

FC ARHU CD

4 credits
Borrowing its title from Cathy Park Hong’s inimitable memoir “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” this course provides an introduction to Asian American studies foregrounding relevant historical contexts and theoretical frameworks that interrogate major “flashpoints” in Asian American studies, to use a term from Cathy J. Schlund-Vial’s recent edited collection by the same name. Schlund-Vial contends that “a flashpoint demands–in the face of political calamity and systemic oppression–reflection, response, and recalibration” (2). “Flashpoints” with considerable bearing on this course include Chinese immigration and exclusion, Japanese internment/incarceration, U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, the consequences of the Korean and Viet Nam wars, the model minority myth, Asian American mental health, resistance to model minority discourses, and recent pandemic fallout. Surveying fiction, essays, graphic narratives, folklore, short stories, poems, archival documents, and the interdisciplinary critical work of an expansive array of Asian American scholars and writers, coursework examines the intimate connections, provocations, and reckonings inherent in the study of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, language, citizenship, and nation in the 20th and 21st centuries.

This course is appropriate for new students.