Program of Study

Program for class of '09 and some '10 degree students.
The program’s curriculum builds upon the foundational course ASAM W1010 Introduction to Asian American studies, which surveys the methodologies and theories central to the field of study, offers a critical analysis of key concepts and texts, and provides a historical overview of Asians in the Americas. Asian American subjectivities are explored in introductory courses on Asian American literatures and cultures and on diasporic and transnational communities and social formations. Advanced courses on gender and sexuality, Asian American women, race and art, Asian American youth cultures, and Asian Americans and the law allow students to deepen their understanding of Asian Americans and their social locations. Students are also encouraged to develop a specialization in a specific discipline, such as anthropology, art, English, history, political science, or sociology. It is strongly recommended that Asian American Studies majors undertake study of a foreign language relevant to their area of specialization. Students should consult with their major adviser to develop an appropriate program of foreign-language study.

Program for NEW students and some class of '10 degree students.
The reforms to the CSER curriculum that were first sketched out in 2006-07 are now in place. Most important is the establishment of a common core for all of our majors and concentrators, composed of two courses: Colonizations-Decolonizations, which will be team-taught by Professor Mae Ngai and myself this Fall, and Race in Scientific and Social Practice which will be taught in the Spring by Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. These two courses provide a common conceptual and historical foundation for CSER students. We are very excited about offering this new opportunity to our students. I wish to thank Professor Mae Ngai and Professor Abu El-Haj for their leadership in developing these offerings, and College Deans Yatrakis and Quigley for their support for curricular development. We welcome student feedback in this first pilot year. Students enrolling in one of the majors or concentrations in 2008 should review the requirements of each major in the fall.

It is required that Asian American Studies majors undertake study of a foreign language relevant to their area of specialization. Students should consult with their major adviser to develop an appropriate program of foreign-language study.

Courses, Spring 2010

ASAM W1010 Introduction to Asian American Studies *required*

Gary Okihiro ~ Day & Time TBA Interdisciplinary, intercultural introduction to the field of Asian American Studies. Major themes include methodological and theoretical formulations central to the field (e.g. racial, gender, and sexual formations, modes and relations of production and class, nation and transnation, oral history, and communities research), history and contemporary issues of identity, family, community, immigration, labor, education, and anti-Asianisms.

ASAM W3918 Asian Americans and the Psychology of Race

Shinhee Han ~ T 11:00 AM - 12:50 PM ~ 420 Hamilton Hall This seminar provides an introduction to mental health issues for Asian Americans. In particular, it focuses on the psychology of Asian Americans as racial/ethnic minorities in the United States by exploring a number of key concepts: immigration, racialization, prejudice, family, identity, pathology, and loss. We will examine the development of identity in relation to self, family, college, and society. Quantitative investigation, qualitative research, psychology theories of multiculturalism, and Asian American literature will also be integrated into the course.

CSER W3906 Race in Scientific and Social Practice *required*

Catherine Fennell ~ M 11:00 AM – 12:50 PM ~ 420 Hamilton Hall This class presents a genealogy of the development of the race concept since the 19th century. Most centrally, we will examine the ways in which race has been conceptualized, substantiated, classified, managed and "observed" in (social) science and medicine. We will read that history of science in tandem with philosophical, anthropological and historical literatures on race and the effects of racial practices in the social and political world writ large. The class will address a series of questions, historical and contemporary. For example, how has the relationship betwen "race" and "culture" been articulated in the history of anthropology in particular, and in racial theory more broadly? How and why were particular phenotypes understood to signify meaningful biological and social differences? Can there be a concept of race without phenotype--a soley genotyppic racial grouping? More broadly, we will examine how particular scientific projects have intersected with, authorized or enabled specific social and political imaginations.

CSER W3990 Senior Thesis Seminar

Prof Frances Negron-Muntaner & TA Anjuli Kolb ~ Day & Time TBA The Senior Paper Colloquium provides undergraduate seniors with an academic context in which to develop their senior papers/theses for the majors administered by the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (Comparative Ethnic Studies, Latino/a Studies, Asian American Studies). The Colloquium is required for all students who want to write a senior paper/thesis. In the senior paper/thesis, students explore in depth some topic of special interest to them by conducting extensive background reading and research.
The Senior Paper Colloquium focuses primarily on developing students’ ideas for their research projects and workshopping their written work. The course is designed to develop and hone the skills necessary to complete the senior paper. Students will receive guidance in researching for and writing an advanced academic paper. Conducted as a seminar, the colloquium provides the students a forum in which to discuss their work with each other. In the seminar, students will give and receive feedback and comment on each other’s work. While most of the course is devoted to the students’ work, during the first weeks of the term students will read and discuss several ethnic studies-oriented texts to help them gain insight into the kinds of research projects done in the field. These texts will serve as models on which students can base their own projects.

Related Courses, Spring 2010

Some courses may have prerequisites or applications, please consult departments directly for specific requirements.

ENGL W4632 Intro to Asian American Lit and Culture

Wen Jin ~ M/W 6:10 - 7:25 PM 3 pts.  (Lecture).  This course provides an introduction to Asian American literature since the mid-nineteenth century, with a focus on the most recent few decades.  What does it mean to be Asian or partly Asian in America?  Are there historical experiences, cultural expressions, or political positions that give Asian Americans a collective identity, as it is often assumed to be the case?  How does the knowledge of their experiences and perspectives enrich our understandings of American culture and U.S.-Asian relations? We will examine these questions through the lens of literature, prose narratives and poetry in particular.  In other words, we will discuss a selected group of literary works so as to uncover the ways in which some the most interesting minds among Asian Americans comment on the meanings of race, ethnicity, and culture, as well as their relations to other social issues, in both American and transnational contexts.  The fiction writers and poets we will read include Maxine Hong Kingston, Hisaye Yamamoto, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Jessica Hagedorn, Lawson Inada, Nam Le, Michael Ondaatje, Aravind Adiga, May-Lee Chai, and Ken Chen.  The syllabus will also include a small number of historical and critical readings.

ENGL W3925 Transpacific Approaches to American Literature

Wen Jin ~ R 2:10 - 4:00 PM 4 pts.Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). Toward the end of the 19th-century, Robert Wilson Shufeldt, who became known as the opener of Korea in 1882, enthusiastically declared that the Pacific was the "ocean bride of America."  Shufeldt was not alone in his belief that what lies across the Pacific is crucial for the economic and cultural growth of the United States.  Until very recently, the U.S.-Asia connections had been under-estimated, but they are frequently reflected and reflected upon in American literature, including both its "canonical" and "minority" components.  This course offers a survey of this literary history, starting from the early twentieth-century.  First, we will consider the ways in which Asia and Asians figure in the fiction of such canonical and popular writers as Frank Norris, John Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon, William Gibson, and Alex Berenson, as well as a number of short poetic works.  We will discuss these writers' fascination with the cultures and people of Asia—what is commonly known as "Orientalism"—in the contexts of various material and political factors (transnational labor migration, global capitalism, and the transnational cultural industry etc.).  The second focus of the course is on literary works that interweave American and Asian histories and cultures, including, mainly, the novels of Agnes Smedley, WEB DuBois, Lin Yutang, Carlos Bulosan, and Alex Kuo.  The course will end with theoretical readings since the early 1990s that seek to explain the implications, for both the U.S. and Asia, of seeing the Asia Pacific (or American Pacific) as an integrated region.

Courses, Fall 2009

ASAM W3900 Seminar in Asian American Studies: Asian Americans and World War II

Gary Okihiro ~ W 2:10 - 4:00 PM ~ 420 Hamilton Wars, especially global ones, are frequently held up as pivotal events in human history, but are they simply continuations, albeit intensified, of past conflicts? And are "world" wars of European nations truly worldwide? Finally, within the U.S., was World War II a "good war" for all Asians and other peoples of color? This seminar will explore those questions, and more, and will provide students with an opportunity to consider in-depth the impacts of wars upon society and the social relations along with the relations of power, which are manifested in those human initiatives.

ASAM W3922 Asian American Cinema

Eric Gamalinda ~ M 11:00 AM - 12:50 PM ~ 420 Hamilton This seminar focuses on the critical analysis of Asian representation and participation in Hollywood by taking a look at how mainstream American cinema continues to essentialize the Asian and how Asian American filmmakers have responded to Hollywood Orientalist stereotypes. We will analyze various issues confronting the Asian American, including yellowface, white patriarchy, male and female stereotypes, the "model minority" myth, depictions of "Chinatowns," panethnicity, the changing political interpretations of the term Asian American throughout American history, gender and sexuality, and cultural hegemonies and privileging within the Asian community.

ASAM W3945 Asian American Trauma

Sel Hwahng ~ M 4:10 – 6:00 PM ~ 420 Hamilton This course will combine historiography, the social sciences, textual analysis, ethnopsychiatry, and public health research to explore Asian American trauma. The course will be divided into roughly three parts. Given that the majority of Asian Americans are immigrants or children of immigrants, the first part of the course will interrogate traumatic aspects of Asian and Asian American histories during the 20th and 21st centuries including the European and Japanese colonizations and invasions of Asian countries, the Philippine-American War, the Pacific War, the Partition of India, the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans, the Korean War, the 1971 Bangladesh War, the Vietnam War, the Laotian Civil War, the Cambodian Civil War, and the Myanmar Civil War. The second part of this course will utilize the examination of trauma as well as racial stratification and immigrant assimilation theories to scrutinize how traumatized Asian immigrants and Asian Americans have been dehistoricized, detraumatized, and reconstituted as the "model minority", the control stratum, and white-collar proletariats in U.S. society. The final part of this course will identify and examine contemporary traumatic effects of these histories and assimilation mechanisms, including culture-bound syndromes and negative health outcomes among Asian Americans such as high rates of depression and suicidality among Asian American women, high rates of liver and stomach cancer among Asian Americans, high-risk sexual behavior among Asian American men who have sex with men; as well as the emergence of Asian American victim-perpetrators in the University of Iowa, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and Virginia Tech massacres.

CSER W3928 Colonizations/Decolonizations *required*

Gray Tuttle & Natasha Lightfoot ~ T 4:10 - 6:00 PM ~ 420 Hamilton This course explores the centrality of colonialism in the making of the modern world, emphasizing cross-cultural and social contact, exchange, and relations of power; dynamics of conquest and resistance; and discourses of civilization, empire, freedom, nationalism, and human rights, from 1500 to 2000. Topics include pre-modern empires; European exploration, contact, and conquest in the new world; Atlantic-world slavery and emancipation; European and Japanese colonialism in Asia, Africa, the Middle East. The course ends with a section on decolonization and post-colonialism in the period after World War II. Intensive reading and discussion of primary documents.

CSER W3990 Senior Thesis Seminar (two semester course)

Prof Frances Negron-Muntaner & TA Anjuli Kolb ~ R 2:10 - 4:00 PM The Senior Paper Colloquium provides undergraduate seniors with an academic context in which to develop their senior papers/theses for the majors administered by the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (Comparative Ethnic Studies, Latino/a Studies, Asian American Studies). The Colloquium is required for all students who want to write a senior paper/thesis. In the senior paper/thesis, students explore in depth some topic of special interest to them by conducting extensive background reading and research.
The Senior Paper Colloquium focuses primarily on developing students’ ideas for their research projects and workshopping their written work. The course is designed to develop and hone the skills necessary to complete the senior paper. Students will receive guidance in researching for and writing an advanced academic paper. Conducted as a seminar, the colloquium provides the students a forum in which to discuss their work with each other. In the seminar, students will give and receive feedback and comment on each other’s work. While most of the course is devoted to the students’ work, during the first weeks of the term students will read and discuss several ethnic studies-oriented texts to help them gain insight into the kinds of research projects done in the field. These texts will serve as models on which students can base their own projects.