Migration and Its Discontents: Asian American Literature and Culture

Catalog description

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. Beginning with indentured labor migration to the Americas in the nineteenth century and ending with refugee migrations as a result of the Vietnam War and the global “war on terror,” this course examines how voluntary and involuntary forms of migration have shaped Asian American culture and aesthetics. What might be a relationship among race, representation, literary form, and political economy? How might studying Asian American literature produce new knowledge about concepts like freedom, globalization, labor, resistance, identity, and belonging? Readings include testimonial and protest literature, experimental prose, site-specific poetry, graphic novels, and speculative autobiographies written by indentured workers, refugees, exiles, and economic migrants from South, Southeast, and East Asia.