Cultural Poetics of the Asian Americas

Catalog description

Intro course on Asian American literature. Studies a wide range of literary texts, supplemented by history, film, and visual art. We pay special attention to the politics of representational forms, such as the poetics of error enacted by Angel Island poetry, the freak show of the original Siamese Twins, the yellowface of Charlie Chan, the deliberate demarcation of documentary history from what Lawson Inada calls legends in his internment camp poems, and the code-switching between standard English and Hawaiian pidgin in performance poetry. We move beyond an America-centered and (standard) English-only approach and relocate the cultural meanings of the Asian Americas in transnationalism, diaspora, yellowface, bilingualism, and translation.