Books You Should Have Read By Now

Catalog description

Topics vary by semester. Fall 2026: "Where are you from?" For some, an innocent question borne out of curiosity, and for others, an unwanted, yet familiar, interrogation into status, citizenship, and identity. These four words often question the belonging and presence of what Lisa Lowe describes as the "foreigner-within," or the Asian American. Immediately, the problem arises: How must we answer this question? What is the "correct" answer? In this course, we will work to understand the complexities of the Asian American identity and its close relation to the perpetual foreigner stereotype. In doing so, we will also contest notions of universal narratives that flatten Asian American experiences by reading a variety of works from Asian American authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, Julie Otsuka, Lê Th? Di?m Thúy, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Cathy Park Hong. This course will examine how Asian American literature engages with the cultural and political construction of disparate Asian American experiences by analyzing numerous themes including, but not limited to: assimilation (or the lack thereof), collective history and memory, acts of resistance, orientalism, identity making, and belonging. In reading and discussing these works and topics, we will provide disobedient and rebellious answers to the inevitable follow-up question: "But where are you really from?" In addition to the required literary works that students will be assigned, this course will also cover key secondary texts that will work to contextualize the rise of the Asian American political identity and engage with Asian American studies, ethnic studies, space and mobility studies, and feminist studies more broadly.