Transpacific Bodies and Materialities

Catalog description

How are Asian American and Pacific Islander bodies figured across different texts—in contemporary novels, poetry, and visual arts? How do the transits and residues of US empire across the Pacific inform these representations? This course investigates texts that center AAPI bodies and their varying materialities, including paper, digital, textual, watery, and earthy forms. We will think through the ways these other-than-human bodies push the bounds of race and gender and question national belonging. Course topics include the Indochina refugee crisis following the War in Vietnam, the US militarization of the Philippines and Guåhan, and the rise of tourism in Hawai‘i. Texts may include fiction by Viet Thanh Nguyen, lê thị diễm thúy, R. Zamora Linmark, and Kristiana Kahakauwila; poems by Rick Barot, Aimee Suzara, Craig Santos Perez, and No’u Revilla; and photography, art installations, and film.