Since their origins at the intersection of global and domestic struggles for liberation, Asian American literature and theory have engaged in a project of imagining liberatory futures—anti-racist, decolonial, queer, non-binary futurities which are premised on a future beyond capital. We will begin by mapping out the intersectionality of discursive problems and material conditions Asian Americans have faced through the critical lens of the critical Marxist studies, critical ethnic studies, diaspora studies, Indigenous studies, gender and queer studies, globalization studies, media studies, cultural studies and critical cartography studies.
We will then move on to analyzing the transformative ways that Asian American writers, critics and artists have rearticulated these issues. How do writers and critics imagine decolonial and abolitionist Asian American futures, and how do those articulations change our present conditions? How do Asian American writers and artists draw from Indigenous and Marxist critiques of capital to imagine new possible futures? How do they imagine queer kinships, temporalities and futurities? How do our alliances with Blacks in the Black Lives Matter movement, with Chicanx and Latinx against anti-migrant settler state policies, and with Native Americans, Kanaka Maoli and Palestinians who challenge the very foundations of the US settler state enable us expand our imaginative capacities? How do they enact in the present an epistemological shift that seeks to ensure a planetary future in the face of global climate change? We will discuss the genres of apocalpytic, utopic, and speculative fiction, magical realism, ecopoetics, romance and allegory, as well as different epistemological foundations, such as Indigenous and Asian ancestral knowledges, interspecies worlding, and new materialisms that help us to broaden the conditions of possibility for future worlds where we can all flourish.
Assignments and course requirements: Two short writing assignments that will help to build toward your final research project (30%); two presentations, one on a reading assignment (10%) and one on the final project; one 7-page conference paper that outlines the objectives of the seminar paper with a bibliography of at least ten entries (10%); 20-page seminar paper that builds on the conference paper (50%), attendance and participation.
Required texts (will be available at the UH Bookstore):
1. Ernes Callenbach, Ecotopia (1975)
1. Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman and the Year of the Dragon (1972)
2. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976)
3. Yuri Kochiyama, Passing It On: A Memoir (2004)
4. Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
5. Joseph Han, Nuclear Family (2022)
6. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (2020)
7. Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange (2017)
8. Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (2021)
10. Jeffrey Santa Ana, Heidi Amin-Hong, Rina Gacia Chua, Zhou Xiaojing, eds. Empire and Environment: Ecological Ruin in the Transpacific (2022)
11. Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies (2021)
Additional readings will be uploaded to Laulima and will include essays by Tan Hoang Nguyen, Kekuhi Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, Lisa Lowe, Dean Saranillio, Bruno Latour, Naomi Klein, Min Song, Mel Chen, Neferti Tadiar, Yen Le Espiritu, Julie Sze, Simone Chun, Alice Chai, Christine Ahn and others.