Asian American Literature & Culture

Catalog description

Diaspora has come to refer to mass dispersions of people with common roots. This course examines the Asian diaspora through readings of contemporary literature. In the course, we discover and define a growing body of contemporary writing, which includes immigrant/migrant histories, memories of exile and refuge, as well as the fiction of imagined homelands. We will study books against their historic, political, economic, geographic, and social backdrops, with a focus on gender, class, and national origins. Authors to be studied Maxine Hong Kingston, Ha Jin, Jumpha Lahiri, Kazim Ali, Haruki Murakami, Craig Santos Perez, Chang-Rae Lee, Nam Le, Lan Cao, and Amy Tan.