Courses listed below are associated with Asian Pacific American and Diaspora Studies. This list is based on the catalog on CAB and may not be exhaustive.
Fall 2024
ETHN 0601A: Introduction to Asian American History
Instructor: Shelley Lee
This course provides an introduction to the histories of people of Asian descent in the United States from the late 18th century to the present. We will focus on the experiences of people with ancestries in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia, considering commonalities and differences by nationality, class, gender, religion, place, and other factors. Topics include orientalism in U.S. culture, immigration and exclusion, Asian American civil rights struggles, and the “model minority.” We eschew any claim that an “authentic” or “typical” Asian American experience exists, instead working from the idea that Asian Americans and their lives are multifaceted, complex, and dynamic. Course materials will include primary and secondary sources and incorporate interdisciplinary scholarship and approaches while being anchored in history.
AMST 1700P: Making Music American: Critical Heritage Studies
Instructor: Kiri Miller
This seminar offers a critical and comparative exploration of American music genres that operate as “heritage music” or “ethnic music” in the context of American multiculturalism. We will collectively investigate how musical practice and related discourse can construct, express, perpetuate, and sometimes challenge various cultural identities, community affiliations, and political ideologies. We will particularly attend to public performance contexts, including music festivals, club dancefloors, and live-streaming/archived online performances. Case studies focus on rural Southern “folk” genres, Chicago blues and house, Asian American taiko ensembles, and norteño/tejano dance musics (from huapango to Selena). Readings draw on historical and ethnographic scholarship grounded in critical heritage studies and critical race theory. Limited to junior-year American Studies and Ethnic Studies concentrators.
ENGL 1762K: Migration and Its Discontents: Asian American Literature and Culture
This course explores the literature of Asian diasporas in the Americas, with special attention to the global forces that shape migration and the vexed questions of settlement and belonging that ensue. By contextualizing Asian American literature in the longer histories of the nineteenth-century “coolie” trade from China and India to the Americas, we will examine how Asian indentured labor shaped Asian American culture and aesthetics. What might be the relationship among race, representation, literary form, and political economy? How might studying Asian American literature produce new knowledge about concepts such as globalization, freedom, resistance, labor, identity, and belonging? Readings include testimonial and protest literature, experimental prose, site-specific poetry, graphic novels, and speculative autobiographies written by authors ranging from indentured workers to refugees, exiles to economic migrants from South, Southeast, and East Asia.
Spring 2025
ETHN 1200C: Introduction to Asian American Studies
Instructor: Kevin Escudero
This course provides an introduction to major issues and formative historical moments within the field of Asian American Studies. Course readings are highly interdisciplinary drawing from scholarship in history, literature, sociology and political science. This course spans multiple historical moments beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing through the present. Topics covered include Asian immigrant and refugee experiences, the movement for Asian American Studies, the construction of an Asian American pan-ethnic identity, community political mobilization and efforts to combat Islamaphobia and anti-Asian violence.
TAPS 1500P: Asian American Theater Making
Instructor: Sophia Skiles
This course frames Asian American theater-making as a dynamic assertion of presence, autonomy and complexity against and beyond a backdrop of cultural, legal and historical exclusion, erasure and assimilation in the United States. In investigating theatrical practices and contexts made about, by and/or for Asian Americans, we explore the in/stability of identity as embodied sites of ambivalence, tension and solidarity. How do Asian American theater artists integrate, reject and transcend the myriad expectations of identity and representation? As scholars and artists, we will read plays, witness and create performances, discuss critical and historical essays and artifacts, and interact with active practitioners across a wide spectrum of Asian American theater-making. Open to advanced undergraduates/graduate students.
