Transformations in Asian American Literatures
*Note: Although this course is designed as an Honors course, you do not need to be in the Honors program to take it. Email me at fujikane@hawaii.edu, and I can give you a course approval override.
**This course fulfills the English major 400-level “Studies” requirement.
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, Chicanos 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? We will be reading texts where Frank Chin critiques “faking blackness for balls” and searches instead for Chinese American models of heroism while Maxine Hong Kingston looks to a young artist’s dream of a play that will transform a divided community, Yuri Kochiyama develops a friendship with Malcolm X and narrates Asian American struggles in relation to African American and American Indian struggles, Karen Tei Yamashita explores the organizing across racial differences of the Third World Student Strikes, Jessica Hagedorn maps the effects of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, Monique Truong explores literary “passing” and racial transformations, and H.M Nacqvi follows the lives of young, hip Pakistani men who must make their way through a post-9/11 world. We will bring these issues home by reading the work of visionaries who share stories about alliances that transform Hawaiʻi’s present and future in The Value of Hawai’i 2. 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.
Required texts (available at Revolution Books, 2626 S. King Street, between Puck’s Alley and 7-11):
Frank Chin, Chickencoop Chinaman / Year of the Dragon
Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
Yuri Kochiyama, Passing It On
Monique Truong, Bitter in the Mouth
Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel
Jessica Hagedorn, Dream Jungle (2003)
H. M. Naqvi, Home Boy: A Novel
The Value of Hawaiʻi 2
A course reader will be available at Professional Image (2633 South King Street, near Kōkua Market).
Course Requirements:
Research assignments that will build toward the research paper (30%)
1 4-page paper (15%)
1 12 page research paper (40%)
Final exam (10%)
Peer-editing (5%)
Attendance and participation