Asian American Literature
Asian American writers and artists imagine both fantastic and radically different possibilities for transformative social and political relationships within Asian American communities and between Asian Americans and other racial/ethnic/indigenous groups. Asian American writers and artists have been defined not just in relation to white Americans but in relation to African American, Latino/a, American Indian, and Pacific Islander communities. We will look at different literary genres, visual arts, and music to trace the ways that Asian American writers, artists and rappers explore these possibilities for alternative worlds and alternative futures.
We will begin by contextualizing the imaginative and transformative ways that Asian American writers and artists have represented themselves and their social relationships. Ethnic studies and Asian American studies emerged at the intersection of global and domestic struggles for liberation. If we take the 1968-1969 Third World Student Strikes at San Francisco State University and U.C Berkeley demanding programs for the study of African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicano/as and Native Americans as a starting point, we can see the historical roots for more recent critical transformations and alliances between Asian Americans and African Americans through the Black Lives Matter movement and alliances with American Indian tribes over global climate change issues. How do Asian American writers, artists, and critics explore aesthetic forms of representation to articulate what is at stake for them, and how are Asian American literature and art key in the production and circulation of knowledge? How do these texts enable alliances between Asian Americans and other ethnic/racial and indigenous groups, building a broad-based movement for civil and human rights? What are the material contradictions they pose, and how can we approach these contradictions in ways that are enabling rather than disabling? Asian American writers both “talk back” to pop culture stereotypes of Asian Americans and explore what poet Kitty Tsui calls our “blood, bone, breath”–the worlds beyond those images. We will begin with stories from the 1970s, an exciting and turbulent time for Asian American writers struggling to define themselves. We will be reading texts where playwright Frank Chin critiques “faking blackness for balls” and searches instead for Chinese American models of heroism while Maxine Hong Kingston looks to stories of women warriors who transform divided communities, Yuri Kochiyama develops a friendship with Malcolm X and narrates Asian American struggles in relation to African American and American Indian struggles, R. Zamora Linmark maps the difficulties of growing up gay, Filipino, and working class in Kalihi, Ocean Vuong pieces together stories of the American war in Vietnam through a queer lens, and Joseph Han explores the separation of Korean families into North Korea and South Korea by the DMZ and later to Hawaiʻi and the dream of the reunification of families. Throughout the course, we will consider the ways that Asian American writers, artists and critics envision and enact political agency, alliances and transformation.
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) include an awareness of the contributions of Asian American literatures to the formation of the contemporary field of English Studies, including such subfields as twentieth-century American literature, ethnic literatures, rhetoric, genre studies and cultural studies, and written and oral ability to situate the study of these literatures within broader critical and historical conversations.
Course Requirements: 1 3-page paper (15%) and 2 4-page papers (20% and 25%), short assignments (20%), final exam (15%), attendance and participation (5%).
Required texts (available at the UH Bookstore):
Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman / Year of the Dragon (1972)
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976)
Yuri Kochiyama, Passing It On (2004)
Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s (1995)
Monique Truong, The Book of Salt (2004)
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
Joseph Han, Nuclear Family (2022)