Teaching

Imagining Asian America

This course provides a general introduction to the study of Asian American literature and culture through the politics of fantasy and from a global framework. Instead of taking “Asian America” as a given, we will explore its construction by tracing how “Asia” and “America” have been imagined separately and together. Placing these fantasies in relation to histories of immigration, imperialism, militarism, and globalization, we will investigate how Asian American writers and artists engage with and intervene in the imagining of Asian America. Throughout, we will pay special attention to the racial fantasies that adhere to everyday objects, including food, fashion, toys, media, and other forms of popular culture. Texts will range from the classic to the contemporary and encompass fiction, poetry, nonfiction, comics, and other media. 

Toy Stories

This course provides a general introduction to children’s literature and childhood studies through examining the cultural and political work of children’s toys. From dolls and action figures to virtual pets and video games, toys enable children to create magical, miniature worlds that exist tucked away within mundane realms of adult life. In this course, we will unpack the power of children’s toys by studying their literatures, histories, and cultures. Special focus will be given to how feminist, queer, disabled, POC, and other minoritarian perspectives complicate normative views of childhood. 

Asian American Women Writers

In this course, we will explore the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality through writing by Asian American women. Both marginalized and fetishized within mainstream literary culture, Asian American women’s writing has often been expected to provide a window into the “authentic” experiences of a group that faces the double jeopardy of racial and gendered discrimination and violence. We will challenge this notion—that the primary value of Asian American women’s writing is that it represents experiences of marginalization—to approach our texts as interventions into dominant aesthetic and political discourses. Texts will range from the classic to the contemporary and encompass fiction, poetry, nonfiction, comics, and other media.

Cute Studies

This course critically examines the aesthetics of cuteness in the context of the politics of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and age, with a special focus on the globalization of Japanese kawaii (“cute”) culture and its impact on Asian diasporas. In its associations with the small, soft, and simple, cuteness is an aesthetic category intimately bound up in differences of power. In this course, we will study literary texts and cultural objects that engage the aesthetic to unpack how cuteness commodifies social difference and distills complex political dynamics within seemingly trivial and mundane aspects of everyday life. We will situate its contemporary popularity in longer histories of imperialism and commodity capitalism, as well as cultural conceptions of Asian people, women, children, and animals. 

Techno-Orientalism

Techno-Orientalism indexes how Asia and Asian people have been imagined in relation to a dystopian, technologized future. This course studies techno-Orientalism through Asian American literature and culture, investigating how Asian Americans participate and intervene in techno-Orientalist fantasies. Viewed as mechanical and unfeeling, Asian American writers and artists have reimagined racist tropes that have rendered them “other,” creating fantasies of disembodiment involving robots, cyborgs, viruses, aliens, and other technoscientific and futuristic beings. We will ask: How are Asian American writers and artists repurposing techno-Orientalism to represent experiences of displacement, alienation, trauma, and erasure? And in what ways are they deconstructing and rendering more fluid our conceptions of the human itself? 

Transpacific Femininities

Transpacific femininities places gender and sexuality at the center of Asian American literature and culture and the geopolitics of the Pacific Rim. Since at least the nineteenth century, femininity has played a critical role in the material and discursive mediation of transpacific relations: from the circulation of feminized Asian commodities and the migration of sex workers, care workers, and other female laborers to the idea of the Orient as the feminine counterpart to the masculinized West. 

In this combined graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar, we will test the parameters of transpacific femininities as an approach for contending with complex networks of relations within and between multiple competing nations and empires. Rather than read literature and culture as representations that grant us access into the “authentic” experiences of marginalized women, we will consider modes of interdisciplinary analysis that activate texts and objects as agents in domestic race relations and international politics.