Crossings, Experiments, Futures: Asian American Media and Culture

What is Asian America? What are Asian American politics? And what are Asian American futures? This course approaches Asian American culture, literature, and politics through three themes: crossings, experiments, and futures. First, we will examine the intersections and crossings that form Asian America, analyzing inter-racial coalitions and conflicts, refugee, Indigenous, and queer Asian American culture. This forms the ground for our investigation into Asian American experimentalism and artists who choose to push the bounds of the possible in their creative forms. Race itself is an experiment, and avant-garde practices have shaped racialized communities that were “never meant to survive,” in Audre Lorde’s words. Living under racist and heteronormative structures of domination, racialized artists have sought radical and experimental ways of being and creating that deviate productively from Western norms. Finally, we will consider Asian American futures through speculative fiction and science fiction film. This unit leads us to ask, what are Asian American futures, and how do we live, resist, and imagine differently?

Sample films/literature:

• If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar (poetry)
• Night Is a SharkSkin Drum by Haunani-Kay Trask (poetry)
• Iep-Jaltok by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner (poetry)
• Gook dir. Justin Chon (film)
• Surname Viet, Given Name Nam dir. Trinh T. Minh-ha (film)
• Advantageous dir. Jennifer Phang (film)
• Soft Science by Franny Choi (poetry)

Sample critical texts:

• Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique
• Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
• Yê’n Lê Espiritu, “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in U.S. Scholarship”
• Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, edited by Shireen Roshanravan and Lynn Fujiwara
• Helen Lee and Celine Parreñas Shimizu, “Sex Acts: Two Meditations on Race and Sexuality” 
• Timothy Yu, Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental Asian American Poetry Since 1965
• Aimee Bahng, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times 
• Vandana Singh, “A Speculative Manifesto”