Reading Culture: Asian American Visual Literatures and Popular Culture

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 206

This course provides a literary introduction to Asian American Studies and Literature through the visual and auditory medium of graphic novels and popular media. Asian Americans have always been visually depicted as savages, sly, childlike foreigners, starting from the early 20th century in political posters, cartoons, movies, and other media. In this course, we will study the influences of these historical representations in films like Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, and Bruce Lee, and modern images popular in movies like Shang-Chi, The Karate Kid, The Brady Bunch, Everything Everywhere All At Once. Overall, we will ask the fundamental question of: How does what we "see" or "do not see", mediate how we see, know, and encounter Asian Americans 'IRL' everyday? What kinds of visibilities and invisibilities shape Asian American presence in the U.S.? Deconstructing this fundamental and often invisible paradigms of visual culture, we will critically interrogate depictions of Asian Americans as racialized subjects, refugees, romantics, survivors, superheroes, mixed race children, international adoptees, feminized/ overhyped masculinities, and whiz kids that characterize the new generation of Asian Americans in the 21st. century. Students will engage in creative assignments of tracing graphic novels, creating zines, blogs, and analyzing visual availability of Asian American presence around them through material, visual, and auditory spaces.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; FA VC; FA CPSC

Section 01

"Reading" Culture:
INSTRUCTOR: Ghosh
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