Spring 2023 Courses

AMST 113. Asian/American Geographies.
W. Cheng, SC, T 2:45-5:30p.m.
What is the relationship between Asian and Asian/American racialization, space, and place? This course brings together questions and texts from Asian American studies, geography, and critical ethnic studies to examine the spatialization of race across multiple scales ranging from the local to the global (e.g., colony, territory, “Chinatown”) as well as placemaking, activism, and place-based worldviews. Specific areas of inquiry and discussion will include: Asian/American engagements with critical Asian and diaspora studies, relationships to Indigeneity and settler colonialism, U.S. militarism and empire, and questions of cultural and place-based memory.

ASAM 056. Intro to Comparative Ethnic Studies.
S. Patel, PZ, Section 01 WF 9:35-10:50a.m.; Section 02 WF 11:00a.m.-12:15p.m.
This course is a study in locating the differential and intersectional formations of power in society and the world. We will explore how race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and nationality organize our political, economic, and social structures. In doing so, we will trace how these structures have subjected Black, Brown, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian American communities to varying scales of violence, from enslavement to labor exploitation, land dispossession, and imperial war. While the course focuses on the ways in which power has historically and contemporarily manifested in communities of color, we will also study how these communities resist, if not imagine, alternative ways of being and knowing.

ASAM 085. Health Inequities.
K. Yep, PZ, R 1:15-4:00p.m.
The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. This participatory course will consider this whole-person definition across the human life course using a range of sociological, political science, and Asian American Studies principles and perspectives. In addition to drawing from Asian/American/Pacific Islander/Desi American (A/APIDA) communities, major topics will include the structure of health care systems in the United States and globally, doctor-patient interaction, social and cultural influences on health and disease, and social disparities in the distribution of health and quality health care. Includes community engagement project outside of class time.

ASAM 089. Embodied Learning, Pedagogies of Belonging, and Qi Gong.
K. Yep, PZ, W 2:45-5:30p.m.
From policing bodies to productivity culture, scholarship examines subsequent distortions of bodies in educational institutions. Our bodies map the ways we are isolated, segmented, and dehumanized. And our bodies also narrate the ways we persist, repair, connect, foster solidarity, and radically reimagine ourselves and the world. The literature illuminates how bodies in classrooms are multi-layered and contested. Highlighting the possibility of social change through education, this course explores Roxana Ng’s framework of “embodied learning” as a potentially decolonizing pedagogical praxis. Through readings, dialogue, and practices, the class examines the hidden curriculum of different corporeal/mind dualisms in classrooms, the impact of (dis)embodiment on educational outcomes, and the transformative possibility of embodied education for critical consciousness and social action. This class investigates qi gong as an epistemological framework and an embodied practice related to liberatory pedagogies. Rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, qi gong involves breathing, awareness, and movement and centers interconnectedness as the basis for its knowledge system. Combining discussion of readings and experiential practice, we will engage in a community-engaged project that includes relational mindfulness, qi gong, and other contemplative practices.

ASAM 090. Asian American and Multiracial Community Studies.
S. Chan, PZ, T 6:00-8:50p.m.
This course introduces students to studying and working beside Asian American and Pacific Islander communities through the exploration of the history, social justice issues, and activism of the San Gabriel Valley. Course materials will draw upon recent scholarship in the field of Asian American Studies and Ethnic Studies, as well as contemporary news media and cultural texts. Guest speakers from the San Gabriel Valley will be invited to speak to students about social issues and activism they are involved with. Course will include a class project that culminates at the end of the semester.

ASAM 128. Body Art in the Diaspora.
T. Honma, PZ, TR 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Course introduces students to various body modification practices, with particular focus on regional developments in Asia, Pacific, and America. Key issues include: identity and community formation; agency, power, and social control; colonialism and post-colonialism; cultural property and appropriation; global circulations of bodies, aesthetics, and labor.

ASAM 137. Philippine Art and Diasporic Visual Culture.
T. Honma, PZ, R 1:15-4:00p.m.
This course focuses on artistic production as a contested site of cultural politics in the Philippines and its global diasporas. We will examine the relationship between aesthetics, nationalism, colonialism, and institutional apparatuses to understand how power is created, maintained, transformed, and opposed through visual modes of representation and meaning. Key questions we will address include: What role does artistic production play in the construction of national narratives about the Philippines, and for what purpose? How is the Philippines represented within the diasporic imagination? How have visual technologies been used as colonial disciplinary mechanisms, and how have these technologies been used for oppositional purposes? What roles do imagination and creativity play within liberatory movements for social change?

ASAM 143 PO. Race and Policing.
B. Nasir, PO, MW 11:00a.m.-12:15p.m.
This course explores historical and anthropological approaches to the study of policing in the United States. With a special emphasis on race and ethnicity, the course will examine several case studies on the policing of Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Muslim communities across American urban centers. In addition, it will probe contemporary abolitionist movements aimed at dismantling policing.

ASAM 144 PO. Anti-Muslim Racism: A Global Perspective.
B. Nasir, PO, W 1:15-4:00p.m.
This course explores the rise of Islamophobia to critically examine anti-Muslim racism and activist responses to it, with an emphasis on the United States. Through ethnographies, hip-hop, and fictional and documentary films, students will learn about the historical and enduring effects of Islamophobia on Muslim and non-Muslim South Asian American, Arab American, and African American communities. In addition, this course will consider emergent forms of antiracist protest forged in response to heightened policing, surveillance, and war in the current age of national security.

ASAM 156. Spirit of Bandung: Third World Internationalism & Decolonization.
S. Patel, PZ, R 1:15-4:00p.m.
Develop an understanding of how the Afro-Asia political project is an insurgent coalitional project. To do this, we will explore the historical and contemporary struggles, insurgencies, and solidarities of Black and Asian peoples. We will learn together how Afro-Asia serves as an insurgent site of critique, resistance, and revolutionary aesthetics that connects distant geographies, diasporas, and Black and Asian peoples to a global anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial political imaginary.

ASAM 160. Asian American Women’s Experiences.
R. Yim, SC, MW 1:15-2:30p.m.
This course is an interdisciplinary examination of Asian and Pacific Islander American women.  It will examine the history and experiences of Asian American women in the United States.  The class will include both lecture and discussion and will cover various issues, such as gender roles, mass media stereotypes, Asian women’s feminism, and the impact of sexism and racism on the lives of Asian American women through education, work, and home life.

ASAM 179K. Asian American Women on Screen.
R. Yim, SC, W 2:45-5:30p.m.
This course will examine historical representations of Asian/American women in movies, TV, and new media in American culture. We will start by theorizing the hypersexuality of Asian women on screen by thinking about the role militarism plays in constructing gendered and racialized stereotypes. We will continue thinking about ongoing representational practices of Asian/American women by watching and engaging with films, TV shows, comedy specials, news clips, and social media. We will consider how engaging with representation as a site of contestation and possibilty might create opportunities for rethinking how gender and sexuality in Asian American studies disrupts depictions of war, migration, violence, the family, memory, and activism on screen.

ASAM 179L. Contemporary Asian American Literature.
R. Yim, SC, M 2:45-5:30p.m.
This course will explore post-1965 Asian American literature and cultural production by close-reading novels, autoethnography, poetry, comics, short stories, and critical theory. In particular we will focus on Asian American cultural production as what Lisa Lowe states is a “site of contestation and possibility for thinking about immigration changed by U.S. involvements in Asia and the historical racialization of Asians in the United States.” The course will think about how Asian American literature is tied to the politics of Asian American experiences. Writers may include: Thi Bui, Mohsin Hamid, Larissa Lai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chanel Miller, Celeste Ng, Janice Lobo Sapigao, Ocean Vuong, Jung Yun, and Michelle Zauner, among others.

ASAM179M. Stories of Survival: Pacific Islander History & Life Writing
A. Flores, HMC, TR 1:15-2:30p.m.
Life writing provides readers with an engaging opportunity to learn about history and its connection to the present. Utilizing the concept of Native survival, this course will examine the history and culture of Pacific Islanders through life writing that includes autobiography, biography, comics, graphic novels, and memoirs. Some of the main themes for this course includes colonialism, diaspora, gender, indigeneity, migration, race, trauma, violence, and war. Class discussions, lectures, film screenings, and readings constitute the interpretive lens for this course.

ASAM 179N. New Directions in Pacific Islander Studies.
A. Flores, HMC, TR 8:10-9:25a.m.
This interdisciplinary historical course will introduce students to a variety of concepts, methods, and theories in Pacific Islander Studies through recently published articles, books, and films. Students will have the opportunity to engage these works and to learn how they are shaping the field. This course will stretch across a broad time period and include themes such as colonialism, diaspora, gender, indigeneity, labor, law, militarization, oral history, sexuality, and war.

GWS 162. Decolonizing Gender and Sexuality in Asian/America.
A. Bahng, PO, W 7:00-9:50p.m.
Through an analysis of historical and contemporary Asian American and Pacific Islander literature, film, performance, art, and popular culture, this course emphasizes a wide range of engagements with gender and sexuality that disrupts binary thinking on the topic. Students will examine the formation of Asian American genders and sexualities alongside histories of racialization, migration, and labor that span East, South, and Southeast Asian, as well as Pacific contexts. In our engagement with transpacific movements of people and culture, we will foreground settler colonial occupations of the Pacific Islands and highlight the work of decolonial queer-feminist thinkers like Haunani-Kay Trask, Maile Arvin, and Stephanie Nohelani Teves. We will attend to the incommensurability of migrant and indigenous frameworks, even as we move through the persistence and at times concurrence of multiple forms of colonialism that connect Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Some questions we will address include: How do historical contexts (i.e. the Cold War, 9/11, Japanese internment) affect Asian American gender formations? What does the popular (Orientalist depictions of Asian women from Geisha Girl to Tiger Mom) have to do with the geo-political (U.S. economic relations with Asia)? How might an Asian American queer politics reveal the limitations of the model minority myth? How can centering Pacific Islander onto-epistemologies decolonize notions of gender and sexuality?

HIST 125. Introduction to Asian American History, 1850-Present.
T. Venit-Shelton, CMC, MW 9:35-10:50a.m.
This survey course examines the history of Asian immigrant groups and their American-born descendants as they have settled and adjusted to life in the United States since 1850.  We will explore issues such as the experience of immigration, daily life in urban ethnic enclaves, and racist campaigns against Asian immigrants.  In addition, this course utilizes an ethnic studies framework that requires students to critically explore other themes such as class, community, empire, gender, labor, race, sexuality, settler colonialism, and war from the perspective of Asian Americans.

HIST 169. Globalization and Oceania: Hawai’i and Tonga.
C. Johnson, PZ, MW 1:15-2:30p.m.
This comparative course explores the deep histories of Hawai’i and Tonga, beginning with their stories of creation and closing with the annexation of these independent kingdoms by the U.S. and British Empires at the end of the nineteenth century. Topics include: creation, voyaging, gender, power, and the land. 

MS 100AA. Asian Americans in Media.
A. Kaneko, PZ, W 2:45-5:30p.m.
This is a historical survey of Asian American involvement in media production, beginning with the silent film era and ending with contemporary projects in film, video, and new media. In this course, we will focus on the shifting yet continuous participation of Asians in the production of media in North America, and look at how changing political, social, and cultural discourses have shaped media representations of Asians throughout this period.

SOC 126AA. Immigration and the Second Generation.
H. Thai, PO, M 1:15-4:00p.m.
Analysis of post-1965 children of immigrants, and/or immigrant children in Asia America. Emphasis on variations on coming of age patterns, the course examines diverse childhood experiences, including ‘transnational’ children, ‘refugee’ children, and ‘left-behind’ children. Emphasis on gender, class, ethnicity, intergenerational relations, education, sexuality, popular culture, and globalization, and specifically how young adults negotiate major American institutions such as the labor market and educational systems.