Topics in AMCS: Immigrant Subjects: War, Refugeehood and Borders in Asian American Literatures

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES 330

Asian American presence in the United States has been a border identity situated within a series of exclusion laws, wars, and global instabilities. Because of this identity, Asian American presence has been systematically silenced and erased from historical knowledge and narratives of U.S. nation building. This course will examine the formation of the Asian American subject in the background of a series of exclusion laws, denationalization through negative diversity in the internment, and the ramifications of U.S. imperial interests in Asia through the Khmer Rouge, Korean and Vietnam wars. As we think about the wars, we will deliberate on the role of modern sovereign nation states and how they have shaped first and third world intersections and discourses of immigration, refugeehood, diaspora, and empire. We will end by discussing how Asian American engagement with war and migration have brought the U.S. into modern era of global transnational multiculturalism. Some of the themes we will cover will be discourses of violence, power, politics, empire, nationalism, borders, citizenship, wars, memorialization, refugeehood and humanity. The course will be taught from a decolonial, humanitarian, and transnational framework to disrupt normative thinking about nationalism, wars, and borders and foster ethical humanitarian interactions with alterity.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Section 01

Topics in AMCS: TBD
INSTRUCTOR: Ghosh
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