AAPI and Empire

Catalog description

The term AAPI is often used as a U.S. demographic category for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, but what brings these disparate groups together? This course explores the interrelation between East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas as geographies and ideological imaginaries shaped by power struggles and empire. How have U.S., Japanese, and other empires structured the exchanges, intimacies, transformations, and tensions linking peoples across the Pacific, Asia and the Americas? What are the social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of colonial invasions, hot wars, cold war, migrations, and racial formations? How does thinking about and critiquing imperialism inform what we mean when we say AAPI? Drawing on visual media, fiction, poetry, historical documents, speeches, and more, this course will track the relationship between the personal and political and ask what subjects emerge from competing imperial modernities. (ENGL-GLS, ENGL-LOA, ENGL-PST)