English 372 / Asian American Film and Television, Prose and Graphic Narratives, Poetry, Architecture
(DL) (WI & O) – Synchronous online
TR 12-1:15 pm
Professor R. Hsu / rhsu@hawaii.edu
Procedure: The class meets online twice a week; I’ll also be meeting with you individually every two or three weeks (via zoom). Assignments and the due dates on those assignments are distributed throughout the semester. Note that this course has O and WI foci.
Description: The exciting and courageous artists, filmmakers, performers, and writers in this course are well worth your effort; they are of Asian ancestry, born in or live primarily in the United States; and they imagine “America” and “American identity” to be complex, heterogenous, dynamic.
We’ll be reading exciting and provocative texts, for example, the against-all-odds film career of Anna May Wong in the first half of the twentieth-century, the work of artist, Cyrus Wong, when he worked at early Disney, most notably on Bambi; a speculative novel on the appearance of a large piece of plastic in the Brazilian rain forest; architects who have re-imagined the connections between nature and human, time and chronology; and poets of revolution in terms of politics and American letters. Presently, when the artistic expression of “people of color” are under attack by all kinds of partisans, “reading” and engaging with their work is even more important than before.
Required assignments include completing reading and viewing assignments before class; a bi-weekly Forum post on the reading assignments; three 5 to 10-minute class presentations; one research-based essay. Amount of writing must total a min. of 4000 words or 16 pages.
Required texts include:
Television/streaming: Kim’s Convenience (sit-com; Canada); performers, such as Margaret Cho, Russell Peters
Poetry: Al Robles, Rappin’ with Ten Thousand Carabaos in the Dark
Films: Bitter Melon (H. P. Mendoza): Better Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin); The Half of It (Alice Wu); Nomadland (Chloe Zhao)
Prose: Leonard Chang, Triplines: an autobiographical novel; Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous; Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (speculative fiction)
Graphic Novels: Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese
Student Learning Outcomes (SLO):
- Gain an understanding of shared themes as well as the heterogeneity of Asian American plays, films, and art;
- Gain an understanding of the ways that Asian American cultural texts and identity transform, complement and otherwise engage with differing “Americas”;
- Enhance the ability to think, to discuss and to write independently about literary and cultural texts.