Courses

Section 1 | TR 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM | Instructor: Lisa Ho
Section 2 | TR 5:30 PM – 6:30 PM | Instructor: Victor Jew

Introduction to the historical, sociological, anthropological, political, and cultural study of Americans of Asian ancestry.

MW 8:50-10:40 AM | Instructor: Peggy Choy

This course introduces a body of movement that has been brought into the United States by Asians, where the forms have been practiced, passed on, sustained and transfigured. All forms studied focus on utilizing internal life-force energy–ki (Korean and Japanese) or qi (Chinese). Meditation and movement techniques will be taught in the context of Asian philosophy and Asian American ethnic, cultural, and historical perspectives. Individual and group composition and improvisation exercises are integral to the curriculum. Students practice risk-taking and best effort through the exploration of Asian movement, ethnic history, and cultural identity, with attention to different facets and the diversity of Asian American experience.

TR 1:20-2:10 PM | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Since the 19th century, “America” has often been defined by its relationship with “Asia,” through cultural influence, immigration, imperialism, and war. Traces the role of Asia and Asians in American literature and culture, from the Chinese and Japanese cultural influences that helped shape literary modernism to the rise of a distinctive culture produced by Asian immigrants to America and their descendants.

MW 12:05-12:55 PM | Instructor: Leslie Bow

How does fantasy project both desires and anxieties surrounding Asian Americans?
This course explores the ways in which fantasy is a conduit of political meaning as race circulates within Asian American fiction, popular culture, art, and media. Beginning with the processes of stereotyping that fix racial classification, we will move to contemporary creative works that invoke race as fluid performance. Asian American writers, artists, comedians, graphic novelists, illustrators, and playwrights portray identity as both essential and fictive, dependent upon yet transcending the body. Our inquiry will focus on reading racial signs and their meaning within imagined projections of Asia and Asian Americans. We will engage issues such as typing, caricature, and microaggressions; whitewashing, yellowface, and passing; and representation as “discriminatory action.” At the center of our discussion will be questions about authenticity, consumerism, fandom, and activism. But we will also explore desire and positive feeling as conduits of racial meaning through fetishism, cultural appropriation, and kawaii or cute style. How does fantasy allow for the circulation of virtual Asians, race without racial subjects? We will explore the implications of reading race as it is grafted onto nonhuman forms: animals, objects, style, food, fantasy landscapes. We will examine how projections of the future engaging Asian Americans reflect cultural anxieties about race, competition, and immigration in an increasingly globalized world.

TR 11:00 AM -12:15 PM | Instructor: Kong Pheng Pha

Explores how Hmong’s participation in the Secret War that the U.S. waged in Laos shaped their experiences in the U.S., heightening the importance of Hmong Americans’ social, cultural, and political self-definition and in making known their contributions to the advancement of U.S. society.

TR 2:30-3:45 PM | Instructor: Alexander Hopp

In recent years, Southeast Asian American writers have garnered national recognition. In 2016, Vietnamese American author, Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his debut novel The Sympathizer. That same year, Hmong American poet, Mai Der Vang won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her collection, Afterland: Poems. Both award-winning literary works explored the themes of U.S. empire, war, trauma, displacement, memory, family, and belonging while at the same time, drawing critical attention to how the figure of the “refugee” plays an important role in the cultural, historical, social, and political landscape of U.S. national memory. Using a variety of refugee texts, including memoirs, film, poetry, and art, this course explores these themes further.

MW 5:30-6:45 PM | Instructor: Alexander Hopp

MW 4:00-5:15 PM | Instructor: Jan Miyasaki

This course examines the history of Asian American coalition building. We will look at the formation of community organizations and pan-Asian organizations to promote political effectiveness in response to discrimination based upon race and national origin in order to promote and protect their constituents, as well as to provide the mutual assistance needed to survive in America. Transformation of individual identity will be explored.

MW 2:30-3:45 PM | Instructor: Victor Jew

This course focuses on how the food culture of Asian America is an entryway point to understand the vibrant communities, complex politics, and rich histories that constitute this demographic. This course will explore the following questions: How does food allow for ethnic communities to express their identity? How does food allow for different generations to express their unique experiences while preserving the roots of the culture? How does food allow us to engage in conversations about assimilation, community, and social constructions of difference? By using food to understand the complex formation of identity, we can also understand how the practices of systematic exclusion, racism, and xenophobia has influenced how Asian America has used the medium of food to cope, remember, and ultimately document these moments. Aside from consumption, we will also examine how Asian America has contributed to the agricultural culture and entrepreneurial tradition of the United States through their racialized and gendered labor. Lastly, the goal of this course is to use food as an avenue to bring attention to how Asian America has powerfully used the medium of food to crave a place for itself in the United States.

MW 2:25-4:05 PM | Instructor: Peggy Choy

The course explores African American and Asian American connections and the creative possibilities of these connections through investigation of practice and theory of the following martial arts, exercise, and dance forms: 1. chang quan (hard-style Chinese martial arts) 2. qigong (Chinese vital exercise form) 3. American boxing, and 4. urban vernacular dance (particularly breaking and house).

TR 1:00-2:15 PM | Instructor: Lisa Ho

Examines representations of Asian American in American media using historical, analytical, and critical approaches. Issues of cultural production, identity, race, politics, and gender are linked to examinations of specific media forms.

TR 1:00-2:15 pm | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Comics have often been dismissed as a simplistic medium meant for children, but in the past few decades they have gained increasing respect as serious literature, often under the label “graphic novels.” And the past two decades have seen an explosion of comics, graphic novels, and graphic memoirs from Asian American creators. We’ll survey this growing body of work, beginning with the question of what comics and graphic novels are and how they differ from other forms of art and literature. We’ll then examine the distinctive contributions Asian Americans are making to the form, considering how Asian Americans use the medium of comics to narrate history, respond to stereotypes, and tell new stories.

T 1:20-3:15 PM | Instructor: Paul Tran

Throughout the history of Asian America, poetry has been a vehicle for the creation and exploration of an Asian American voice; in poetry we can see the continuing struggle over what form Asian American expression will take. Will it follow Asian or European models? Will it employ traditional forms, or experiment in search of new styles? Will it be individual or collective, introspective or political? We will explore these questions through a study of a wide range of Asian American poets from a variety of historical periods and ethnicities, including Janice Mirikitani, Lawson Fusao Inada, Li-Young Lee, John Yau, Myung Mi Kim, and Linh Dinh.

May 22-Jul 16 | Online | Instructor: Lisa Ho

The modality of this course is asynchronous. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defines refugee as someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.? This definition represents the refugee as a victim, whose statelessness compels the need for resettlement within the nation-state. In the context of Asian America, this narrow construct of the refugee has overlapped with how Asians have been racialized, gendered, and sexualized in the United States. In response, this course utilizes the framework of critical refugee studies to expose how the violence of empire and militarism has created the conditions of mass displacement by centering the figure of the refugee as a disruptive force to the normalization of the nation-state. In addition, we will use the lens of critical refugee studies to center refugees as social actors whose lives are filled with complexity and intention. We trace these lives of intention and complexity through topics such as resettlement, assimilation, cultural representations, incarceration, and the second generation. The purpose of this course is to practice the analytics of critical refugee studies to better understand how the refugee populations of Asian America have empowered themselves to remember and resist the forces of empire and militarism.

June19-August 13 | TR 1:00-2:15 PM | Online | Instructor: Lisa Ho

The course focuses on the historical, cultural, and social conditions that have led Asian/Asian Americans into the fields of STEM. The course highlights how categorical understandings of race, nationality, and gender have encouraged this demographic into the professional roles offered by STEM; it has also limited their ascent into positions of leadership. The goal of the course is to provide students with the critical thinking skills to better understand and navigate these environments.

TR 2:30-3:45 PM | Instructor: Alexander Hopp

Introduction to the historical, sociological, anthropological, political, and cultural study of Americans of Asian ancestry.

MW 8:50-10:40 AM | Instructor: Peggy Choy

This course introduces a body of movement that has been brought into the United States by Asians, where the forms have been practiced, passed on, sustained and transfigured. All forms studied focus on utilizing internal life-force energy–ki (Korean and Japanese) or qi (Chinese). Meditation and movement techniques will be taught in the context of Asian philosophy and Asian American ethnic, cultural, and historical perspectives. Individual and group composition and improvisation exercises are integral to the curriculum. Students practice risk-taking and best effort through the exploration of Asian movement, ethnic history, and cultural identity, with attention to different facets and the diversity of Asian American experience.

TR 11:00-11:50 AM | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Since the 19th century, “America” has often been defined by its relationship with “Asia,” through cultural influence, immigration, imperialism, and war. Traces the role of Asia and Asians in American literature and culture, from the Chinese and Japanese cultural influences that helped shape literary modernism to the rise of a distinctive culture produced by Asian immigrants to America and their descendants.

TR 1:00-2:15 PM | Instructor: James McMaster

This course is an opportunity for students to study the specific qualities of queer and Asian emotional life in the United States. It asks questions like, How do those held by the categories of queerness and/or Asianness feel about themselves and the world, and how do others in the world feel about them in turn? Why do all of these people feel this way? And what historical, political, economic, and social circumstances have given rise to those feelings? Over the course of the past few decades affect theory—basically, the study of feelings, their ontology, their causes, and their effects—has emerged as a key explanatory framework for understanding what it is to affect and to be affected, to move and to be moved, to feel and to be felt. Students will spend the semester engaging with affect theory, alongside queer and Asian Americanist critique and cultural production through close readings, conversations, critical writing, and creative projects.Key theorists covered in the course include Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, José Esteban Muñoz, Karen Shimakawa, David Eng, Audre Lorde, and Martin Manalansan. Taking seriously the political stakes of studying affect and emotion, the ultimate aim of this course is to provide students with the tools to discuss how people feel, why they feel that way, whether they should feel otherwise, and how to make it so.

TR 2:25-3:15 PM | Instructor: Chong Moua

This is an introductory course to Hmong/American Studies, an emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry that deals with the history, culture, and contemporary concerns of Hmong/American refugees.

TR 11:00 AM -12:15 PM | Instructor: Lisa Ho

This course examines the conditions under which Asian Americans have sought political power, and the different forms of activism—electoral, cultural, radical—that they have engaged in to create alternative futures for themselves and for allied communities. While the course begins with the creation of Asian American Studies, the course will explore how Asian America has positioned itself within the current political landscape. In particular, we will focus on topics such as affirmative action, #blacklivesmatter, new media, #metoo, and other related matters.

MW 2:30-3:45 PM | Instructor: Victor Jew

In this course we will study the new (and unknown) social geographies of Asian America in the Midwest and the South. We’ll use a variety of methods including “virtual visits” via You Tube videos that can help us understand sites and experiences such as the Hmong American Midwest in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Filipinx American Chicago, Vietnamese American Milwaukee and Asian Indians in Indiana. We will also do original historical projects to recover the lost, neglected, and untaught histories of Asian America in these surprising “new” places that are actually quite old with rich Asian American pasts.

MW 2:25-4:05 PM | Instructor: Peggy Choy

The course explores African American and Asian American connections and the creative possibilities of these connections through investigation of practice and theory of the following martial arts, exercise, and dance forms: 1. chang quan (hard-style Chinese martial arts) 2. qigong (Chinese vital exercise form) 3. American boxing, and 4. urban vernacular dance (particularly breaking and house).

MW 1:00-2:15 PM | Instructor: Lisa Ho

Examines representations of Asian American in American media using historical, analytical, and critical approaches. Issues of cultural production, identity, race, politics, and gender are linked to examinations of specific media forms.

TR 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM | Instructor: Alexander Hopp

Explores the history and circumstances whereby Hmong Americans came together as a political unit to address the domestic and international concerns of the Hmong American community.

W 6:00-8:30 PM | Instructor: Alexander Hopp

This course considers the historical, political, and cultural bases of race and racialization in Asian America, analyzing processes of racial formation through an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach. The class centers Asian Americans’ agency to dispute, reconfigure, dismiss, and, in some cases, maintain their racialized identities, embracing a comparative framework to better understand the nuances of racialization within the diverse populations that constitute Asian America. By considering a more full picture of the racial landscape of the United States, the class will work towards a critical analysis of the impact of race and racialization on Asian American experiences today, reflecting upon what liberation from these structures, hierarchies and ideologies might look like for all of us.

TR 11:00-12:15 PM | Instructor: Lisa Ho

Introduction to the historical, sociological, anthropological, political, and cultural study of Americans of Asian ancestry.

MW 8:50-10:40 AM | Instructor: Peggy Choy

This course introduces a body of movement that has been brought into the United States by Asians, where the forms have been practiced, passed on, sustained and transfigured. All forms studied focus on utilizing internal life-force energy–ki (Korean and Japanese) or qi (Chinese). Meditation and movement techniques will be taught in the context of Asian philosophy and Asian American ethnic, cultural, and historical perspectives. Individual and group composition and improvisation exercises are integral to the curriculum. Students practice risk-taking and best effort through the exploration of Asian movement, ethnic history, and cultural identity, with attention to different facets and the diversity of Asian American experience.

TR 1:20PM-2:10 PM | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Since the 19th century, “America” has often been defined by its relationship with “Asia,” through cultural influence, immigration, imperialism, and war. Traces the role of Asia and Asians in American literature and culture, from the Chinese and Japanese cultural influences that helped shape literary modernism to the rise of a distinctive culture produced by Asian immigrants to America and their descendants.

TR 11:00-12:15 PM | Instructor: Cindy I-Fen Cheng

Examines the impact of colonialism, war, and capitalism on the movement of Asians to the U.S. Considers how racial, gendered, class, sexual, and national formations within the U.S. structured Asian immigration to North America.

TR 11:00-12:15 PM | Instructor: Alexander Hopp

Explores how Hmong’s participation in the Secret War that the U.S. waged in Laos shaped their experiences in the U.S., heightening the importance of Hmong Americans’ social, cultural, and political self-definition and in making known their contributions to the advancement of U.S. society.

MW 9:55-10:45 AM | Instructor: TBD

Sociological analysis of historical and recent ethnic/racial conflict and movements in the U.S., including the relations between European Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, with additional material on other groups and relations.

MW 4:00-5:15 PM | Instructor: Jan Miyasaki

This course examines the history of Asian American coalition building. We will look at the formation of community organizations and pan-Asian organizations to promote political effectiveness in response to discrimination based upon race and national origin in order to promote and protect their constituents, as well as to provide the mutual assistance needed to survive in America. Transformation of individual identity will be explored.

TR 4:00-5:15 PM | Instructor: LiLi Johnson

Using transnational adoption from Asia as a launching point, this course examines the history and narratives of Asian American family and kinship in United States culture. We will consider how race has been socially defined through ideas of family, inheritance, and culture. And ask, how does transnational adoption help us understand the history of American empire, multiculturalism, and neoliberalism? What does it mean to belong (or not belong) in an Asian American family? Using scholarship, films, and literature, this course will use family and kinship as a framework for thinking about Asian American racialization and its intersections with gender, sexuality, and migration.

TR 2:30-3:45 PM | Instructor: Chong Moua

In recent years, Southeast Asian American writers have garnered national recognition. In 2016, Vietnamese American author, Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his debut novel The Sympathizer. That same year, Hmong American poet, Mai Der Vang won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her collection, Afterland: Poems. Both award-winning literary works explored the themes of U.S. empire, war, trauma, displacement, memory, family, and belonging while at the same time, drawing critical attention to how the figure of the “refugee” plays an important role in the cultural, historical, social, and political landscape of U.S. national memory. Using a variety of refugee texts, including memoirs, film, poetry, and art, this course explores these themes further.

MW 4:00-5:15 PM | Instructor: James McMaster

This course surveys key moments in Asian American history from the perspective of Asian American theatre, performance art, and political activism. How have Asian Americans used theatre and performance to challenge the violences that they have faced in historical moments like the one through which we are currently living? How have Asian American activists and organizers challenged the conditions of white supremacy, racial capitalism, border violence, and U.S. imperialism in planned and embodied ways? Throughout the semester we will seek to answer each of these questions simultaneously, attending to the relationship between the course’s key terms: Asian American performance and politics. Our goal is not merely to understand and evaluate how other people have used aesthetic and everyday performance tactics to challenge anti-Asian violence. It is instead to learn how to do such a thing ourselves from the specificity of our own social locations.

TR 2:30-3:45 PM | Instructor: Lisa Ho

This course focuses on how the food culture of Asian America is an entryway point to understand the vibrant communities, complex politics, and rich histories that constitute this demographic. This course will explore the following questions: How does food allow for ethnic communities to express their identity? How does food allow for different generations to express their unique experiences while preserving the roots of the culture? How does food allow us to engage in conversations about assimilation, community, and social constructions of difference? By using food to understand the complex formation of identity, we can also understand how the practices of systematic exclusion, racism, and xenophobia has influenced how Asian America has used the medium of food to cope, remember, and ultimately document these moments. Aside from consumption, we will also examine how Asian America has contributed to the agricultural culture and entrepreneurial tradition of the United States through their racialized and gendered labor. Lastly, the goal of this course is to use food as an avenue to bring attention to how Asian America has powerfully used the medium of food to crave a place for itself in the United States.

MW 4:00-5:15 PM | Linda Pheng

This course will examine the experiences of Asian American students across various educational contexts.

TR 1:05-2:55 PM | Instructor: Peggy Choy

The course explores African American and Asian American connections and the creative possibilities of these connections through investigation of practice and theory of the following martial arts, exercise, and dance forms: 1. chang quan (hard-style Chinese martial arts) 2. qigong (Chinese vital exercise form) 3. American boxing, and 4. urban vernacular dance (particularly breaking and house).

MW 2:30-3:45 AM | Instructor: Victor Jew

Examines representations of Asian American in American media using historical, analytical, and critical approaches. Issues of cultural production, identity, race, politics, and gender are linked to examinations of specific media forms.

TR 11:00-12:15 PM | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Is the future Asian? From Jack London’s visions of the yellow peril to Blade Runner’s 1980s “techno-orientalism,” we’ll see how American science fiction projects its fantasies and fears about the future onto Asia. We’ll draw on this background to approach the growing body of work by Asian American authors in science fiction, including authors such as Charles Yu, Ryka Aoki, Ken Liu, Ling Ma, and Cathy Park Hong.

May 23-Jul 17 | Online | Instructor: Lisa Ho

The modality of this course is asynchronous. This course will examine the contemporary history of Asian America by focusing on newly arrived Asian ethnic groups, the exclusion of Pacific Islanders, and a variety of issues that have come to define the Asian America. The first half of the course will focus on groups from Southeast Asia and the Pacific. We will use this first portion to identify key patterns and distinctions that complicate how we understand the formation of Asian American identity, communities, and belonging. The second half of the course will explore different topics such as assimilation, higher education, popular culture, and other related areas. The purpose of this portion is to gain insight to the contemporary landscape of Asian America and different emerging issues that have gained cultural, political, and economic significance. The goal of this course is to provide critical insight into the different structural and cultural conditions that constitute Asian America today but also to encourage students to develop their own strategies to inquire about other areas of interest.

Jun 20-Aug 14| Online | Instructor: Lisa Ho

The modality of this course is asynchronous. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defines refugee as someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.? This definition represents the refugee as a victim, whose statelessness compels the need for resettlement within the nation-state. In the context of Asian America, this narrow construct of the refugee has overlapped with how Asians have been racialized, gendered, and sexualized in the United States. In response, this course utilizes the framework of critical refugee studies to expose how the violence of empire and militarism has created the conditions of mass displacement by centering the figure of the refugee as a disruptive force to the normalization of the nation-state. In addition, we will use the lens of critical refugee studies to center refugees as social actors whose lives are filled with complexity and intention. We trace these lives of intention and complexity through topics such as resettlement, assimilation, cultural representations, incarceration, and the second generation. The purpose of this course is to practice the analytics of critical refugee studies to better understand how the refugee populations of Asian America have empowered themselves to remember and resist the forces of empire and militarism.

MW 2:30-3:45 pm | Instructor: Victor Jew

Introduction to the historical, sociological, anthropological, political, and cultural study of Americans of Asian ancestry.

TR 11:00-11:50 am | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Introduction to comparative ethnic studies, examining race, ethnicity, and indigeneity within the United States. Includes perspectives from African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Chican@ and Latin@ studies.

MW 8:50-10:30 am | Instructor: Peggy Choy

This course introduces a body of movement that has been brought into the United States by Asians, where the forms have been practiced, passed on, sustained and transfigured. All forms studied focus on utilizing internal life-force energy–ki (Korean and Japanese) or qi (Chinese). Meditation and movement techniques will be taught in the context of Asian philosophy and Asian American ethnic, cultural and historical perspectives. Individual and group composition and improvisation exercises are integral to the curriculum. Students practice risk-taking and best effort through the exploration of Asian movement, ethnic history and cultural identity, with attention to different facets and the diversity of Asian American experience.

TR 2:25-3:15 pm | Instructor: Chong Moua

This is an introductory course to Hmong/American Studies, an emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry that deals with the history, culture, and contemporary concerns of Hmong/American refugees.

TR 9:30-10:45 am  | Michael Cullinane

In-depth study of the peoples, conflicts, and wars in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with emphasis on the Cold War era (1945-1990) and on the resulting migration and resettlement of over one million Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Vietnamese in the United States.

TR 2:30-3:45 pm | Instructor: Morris Young

Survey of Asian American literature from 1880 to present.

TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm | Instructor: Yang Sao Xiong

Explores the history and circumstances whereby Hmong Americans came together as a political unit to address the domestic and international concerns of the Hmong American community.

TR 1:00-2:15 pm | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Comics have often been dismissed as a simplistic medium meant for children, but in the past few decades they have gained increasing respect as serious literature, often under the label “graphic novels.” And the past two decades have seen an explosion of comics, graphic novels, and graphic memoirs from Asian American creators. We’ll survey this growing body of work, beginning with the question of what comics and graphic novels are and how they differ from other forms of art and literature. We’ll then examine the distinctive contributions Asian Americans are making to the form, considering how Asian Americans use the medium of comics to narrate history, respond to stereotypes, and tell new stories.

TR 4:00-5:15 pm | Instructor: LiLi Johnson

This course will explore the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality through an examination of Asian American feminist scholarship, activism, and writing. Using scholarship, film, literature, and activism, this course will use multidisciplinary approaches to ask: what constitutes Asian American feminism? How does it exist in multiple forms across history, geography, and politics? And how can it expand our understanding, not only of Asian American women’s experiences, but also how gender and sexuality shape Asian American racialization more broadly? We will also consider how Asian American feminisms connect to themes of citizenship, empire, class, and labor.

MW 1:05 am-2:45 pm | Instructor: Peggy Choy

The course explores African-American and Asian-American connections and the creative possibilities of these connections through investigation of practice and theory of the following martial arts, exercise and dance forms: 1) chang quan (hard-style Chinese martial arts), 2) qigong (Chinese vital exercise form), 3) American boxing, and 4) urban vernacular dance (particularly breaking and house).

TR 2:30-3:45 pm  |  Hemant Shah

Representations of minority groups in U.S. news and entertainment mass media. Historical, social, political, economic, and other factors influencing the mass mediated depictions of minorities.

MW 12:15PM – 1:55PM | 510 Lathrop Hall | Instructor: Peggy Choy

This course introduces a body of movement that has been brought into the United States by Asians, where the forms have been practiced, passed on, sustained and transfigured. All forms studied focus on utilizing internal life-force energy–ki (Korean and Japanese) or qi (Chinese). Meditation and movement techniques will be taught in the context of Asian philosophy and Asian American ethnic, cultural and historical perspectives. Individual and group composition and improvisation exercises are integral to the curriculum. Students practice risk-taking and best effort through the exploration of Asian movement, ethnic history and cultural identity, with attention to different facets and the diversity of Asian American experience.

TR 1:20PM – 2:10PM | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Since the 19th century, “America” has often been defined by its relationship with “Asia,” through cultural influence, immigration, imperialism, and war. Traces the role of Asia and Asians in American literature and culture, from the Chinese and Japanese cultural influences that helped shape literary modernism to the rise of a distinctive culture produced by Asian immigrants to America and their descendants.

MW 12:05-12:55 pm | Instructor: Leslie Bow

Explores fantasy as a conduit of political meaning in Asian American fiction, graphic novels, anime, and art. Analyzes race as it circulates in visual mediums and literary texts. Engages issues such as stereotyping, caricature, and microaggressions; whitewashing, yellowface, and passing; race fetishism; cultural appropriation; multiracialism; kawaii or cute style; techno- orientalism and virtual Asians. Foregrounding fantasies of bodilessness, the course examines race as it is grafted onto nonhuman forms-objects, digital avatars, robots-at the borders of science and fiction. Examines how projections of the future reflect cultural anxieties about race, immigration, and Asian Americans.

TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm | Instructor: Yang Sao Xiong

Explores how Hmong’s participation in the Secret War that the U.S. waged in Laos shaped their experiences in the U.S., heightening the importance of Hmong Americans’ social, cultural, and political self-definition and in making known their contributions to the advancement of U.S. society.

MW 9:55 – 10:45 am

Sociological analysis of historical and recent ethnic/racial conflict and movements in the U.S., including the relations between European Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, with additional material on other groups and relations.

MW 4:00-5:15 pm | Instructor: Jan Miyasaki

This course examines the history of Asian American coalition building. We will look at the formation of community organizations and pan-Asian organizations to promote political effectiveness in response to discrimination based upon race and national origin in order to promote and protect their constituents, as well as to provide the mutual assistance needed to survive in America. Transformation of individual identity will be explored.

MW 4:00-5:15 pm | Instructor: LiLi Johnson

Using transnational adoption from Asia as a launching point, this course examines the history and narratives of Asian American family and kinship in United States culture. We will consider how race has been socially defined through ideas of family, inheritance, and culture. And ask, how does transnational adoption help us understand the history of American empire, multiculturalism, and neoliberalism? What does it mean to belong (or not belong) in an Asian American family? Using scholarship, films, and literature, this course will use family and kinship as a framework for thinking about Asian American racialization and its intersections with gender, sexuality, and migration.

TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm | Instructor: Lisa Ho

This course will examine the contemporary history of Asian America by focusing on newly arrived Asian ethnic groups, the exclusion of Pacific Islanders, and a variety of issues that have come to define the Asian America. The first half of the course will focus on groups from Southeast Asia and the Pacific. We will use this first portion to identify key patterns and distinctions that complicate how we understand the formation of Asian American identity, communities, and belonging. The second half of the course will explore different topics such as assimilation, higher education, popular culture, and other related areas. The purpose of this portion is to gain insight to the contemporary landscape of Asian America and different emerging issues that have gained cultural, political, and economic significance. The goal of this course is to provide critical insight into the different structural and cultural conditions that constitute Asian America today but also to encourage students to develop their own strategies to inquire about other areas of interest.

TR 1:00 – 2:15 pm | Instructor: Lisa Ho

This course focuses on how the food culture of Asian America is an entryway point to understand the vibrant communities, complex politics, and rich histories that constitute this demographic. This course will explore the following questions: How does food allow for ethnic communities to express their identity? How does food allow for different generations to express their unique experiences while preserving the roots of the culture? How does food allow us to engage in conversations about assimilation, community, and social constructions of difference? By using food to understand the complex formation of identity, we can also understand how the practices of systematic exclusion, racism, and xenophobia has influenced how Asian America has used the medium of food to cope, remember, and ultimately document these moments. Aside from consumption, we will also examine how Asian America has contributed to the agricultural culture and entrepreneurial tradition of the United States through their racialized and gendered labor. Lastly, the goal of this course is to use food as an avenue to bring attention to how Asian America has powerfully used the medium of food to crave a place for itself in the United States.

MW 2:30-3:45 pm | Instructor: Victor Jew

Asian America is 200 years old (its history goes back to 1820) and it is everywhere in the U.S. Two regions with growing Asian American populations are the Midwest and the South. While most people think of the West Coast when they hear “Asian America” the Midwest and the South have distinctive Asian American profiles with much longer histories than is known (in the Midwest, Asian America has a 150 year history!) In this course we will study these unknown social geographies by using a variety of methods including “virtual visits” via YouTube videos that can help us understand such sites as the Hmong American Midwest in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Missouri; Filipinx American Chicago; Vietnamese American Milwaukee and Asian Indian communities in Indiana. We will also do original historical projects to recover the lost, neglected, and untaught histories of Asian America in these surprising “new” places that are actually quite old with rich Asian American pasts.

TR 11:00AM – 12:15 pm | Choua Xiong

TR 2:30- 3:45 pm | Instructor: Chong Moua

In recent years, Southeast Asian American writers have garnered national recognition. In 2016, Vietnamese American author, Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his debut novel The Sympathizer. That same year, Hmong American poet, Mai Der Vang wont the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her collection, Afterland: Poems. Both award-winning literary works explored the themes of U.S. empire, war, trauma, displacement, memory, family, and belonging while at the same time, drawing critical attention to how the figure of the “refugee” plays an important role in the cultural, historical, social, and political landscape of U.S. national memory. Using a variety of refugee texts, including memoirs, film, poetry, and art, this course explores these themes further.

TR 9:30 – 10:45 am | Instructor: Lori Lopez

Examines representations of Asian American in American media using historical, analytical, and critical approaches. Issues of cultural production, identity, race, politics, and gender are linked to examinations of specific media forms.

TR 11:00 am – 12:15 pm | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Throughout the history of Asian America, poetry has been a vehicle for the creation and exploration of an Asian American voice; in poetry we can see the continuing struggle over what form Asian American expression will take. Will it follow Asian or European models? Will it employ traditional forms, or experiment in search of new styles? Will it be individual or collective, introspective or political? We will explore these questions through a study of a wide range of Asian American poets from a variety of historical periods and ethnicities, including Janice Mirikitani, Lawson Fusao Inada, Li-Young Lee, John Yau, Myung Mi Kim, and Linh Dinh.

TR 1:00 – 2:40 pm | Instructor: Peggy Choy

The course explores African-American and Asian-American connections and the creative possibilities of these connections through investigation of practice and theory of the following martial arts, exercise and dance forms: 1) chang quan (hard-style Chinese martial arts), 2) qigong (Chinese vital exercise form), 3) American boxing, and 4) urban vernacular dance (particularly breaking and house).

Instructor: Peggy Choy

MTWRF 9:00AM – 1:15PM  | May 24 – Jun 13  |  249 Lathrop Hall

This course introduces a body of movement that has been brought into the United States by Asians, where the forms have been practiced, passed on, sustained and transfigured. All forms studied focus on utilizing internal life-force energy–ki (Korean and Japanese) or qi (Chinese). Meditation and movement techniques will be taught in the context of Asian philosophy and Asian American ethnic, cultural and historical perspectives. Individual and group composition and improvisation exercises are integral to the curriculum. Students practice risk-taking and best effort through the exploration of Asian movement, ethnic history and cultural identity, with attention to different facets and the diversity of Asian American experience.

Instructor: Victor Jew

TR 11:00AM – 12:20PM  |  May 17 – Jul 11  | ONLINE

Has Crazy Rich Asians changed anything in Hollywood?  Are more Asian American themed movies and Asian American actors going to appear on Hollywood screens? What about the effects of The Farewell or Parasite or Minari? How about a documentary such as The Problem with Apu? This class will study  the deep, long  and interwoven histories of  Asian America and the U.S. film industry to supply the perspective of past, present, and future to this current cultural moment and the contemporary predicament of Asian America /APIDA (Asian Pacific Islander Desi America.)

Instructor: Lisa Ho

TR 11:00AM – 12:15PM  |  May 17 – Jul 11  | ONLINE

This course focuses on how the food culture of Asian America is an entryway point to understand the vibrant communities, complex politics, and rich histories that constitute this demographic. This course will explore the following questions: How does food allow for ethnic communities to express their identity? How does food allow for different generations to express their unique experiences while preserving the roots of the culture? How does food allows us engage in conversations about assimilation, community, and social constructions of difference? By using food to understand the complex formation of identity, we can also understand how the practices of systematic exclusion, racism, and xenophobia has influenced how Asian America has used the medium of food to cope, remember, and ultimately document these moments. Aside from consumption, we will also examine how Asian America has contributed to the agricultural culture and entrepreneurial tradition of the United States through their racialized and gendered labor. Lastly, the goal of this course is to use food as an avenue to bring attention to how Asian America has powerfully used the medium of food to crave a place for itself in the United States.

Instructor: Lisa Ho

TR 1:00 -2:15PM  |  Jun 14 – Aug 8  |  ONLINE

For the 2021 Grammys, BTS became the first KPOP group to receive a Grammy Nomination in the category of Pop Duo/Group Performance. BTS was not the first KPOP group to achieve commercial success in the United States nor will it be the last. Our globalized economy (and its accompanying technologies) has made it possible for cultural imports like KPOP to circulate across the United States and abroad with ease. In the last decade or so, American-based streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu have begun to offer films, television serials, and documentaries from South Korea, Mainland China, India, Japan, Thailand, and other Asian countries; radically challenging the geographical boundaries of the cultural content that is available to Asian Americans and segments of the Asian diaspora that have settled in English-speaking countries. Consequently, the popularity of these cultural productions has led to a noticeable increase of tourism to Asian countries by Asian Americans and non-Asians as well. Similarly, Asian American content has featured and emphasized the transnational connections between Asian Americans and their geographical origins in Asia and other places of the Asian diaspora. This overlap has created conditions for Asian Americans to develop identities that emphasize the global dimensions of their experiences, histories, and communities. As such, these transnational influences have complicated how we think about race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity; an impact that requires us to link the processes of global capitalism to the formation of identity politics. Lastly, this course examines how the consumption of these Asian cultural imports allows for larger conversations about how the histories of American imperialism, colonization, and militarism provided an infrastructure to facilitate this circulation in the first place.

Instructor: Victor Jew

MW 2:30-3:45 pm

Introduction to the historical, sociological, anthropological, political, and cultural study of Americans of Asian ancestry.

Instructor: Timothy Yu

Remote, Asynchronous

Introduction to comparative ethnic studies, examining race, ethnicity, and indigeneity within the United States. Includes perspectives from African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Chican@ and Latin@ studies.

Instructor: Peggy Choy

MW 12:15-1:55 pm

This course introduces a body of movement that has been brought into the United States by Asians, where the forms have been practiced, passed on, sustained and transfigured. All forms studied focus on utilizing internal life-force energy–ki (Korean and Japanese) or qi (Chinese). Meditation and movement techniques will be taught in the context of Asian philosophy and Asian American ethnic, cultural and historical perspectives. Individual and group composition and improvisation exercises are integral to the curriculum. Students practice risk-taking and best effort through the exploration of Asian movement, ethnic history and cultural identity, with attention to different facets and the diversity of Asian American experience.

Instructor: Benny Witkovski

MW 12:05-12:55 pm

Sociological analysis of historical and recent ethnic/racial conflict and movements in the U.S., including the relations between European Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, with additional material on other groups and relations.

Instructor: Chong Moua

TR 2:25-3:15 pm

This is an introductory course to Hmong/American Studies, an emerging interdisciplinary field of inquiry that deals with the history, culture, and contemporary concerns of Hmong/American refugees.

Instructor: Michael Cullinane

Remote, Asynchronous

Between 1975 and 1995, over two million Southeast Asians fled from the three former French colonies frequently referred to collectively as Indochina: Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Over 1.3 million of these migrants came as refugees to the Uriited States and added four new major ethnic groups to American society: Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Vietnamese, including among them ethnic Chinese and the children of American military personnel (frequently referred to as “Amerasians”). This course is intended to provide a better understanding of the conditions that led these people, and thousands of others, to flee their homelands in Southeast Asia and eventually take refuge and start new lives in the US, as well as in the other countries that offered them asylum (including Canada, Australia, and France).

Instructor: Yang Sao Xiong

TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm

Explores the history and circumstances whereby Hmong Americans came together as a political unit to address the domestic and international concerns of the Hmong American community.

Instructor: Timothy Yu

TR 1:00-2:15 pm

Comics have often been dismissed as a simplistic medium meant for children, but in the past few decades they have gained increasing respect as serious literature, often under the label “graphic novels.” And the past two decades have seen an explosion of comics, graphic novels, and graphic memoirs from Asian American creators. We’ll survey this growing body of work, beginning with the question of what comics and graphic novels are and how they differ from other forms of art and literature. We’ll then examine the distinctive contributions Asian Americans are making to the form, considering how Asian Americans use the medium of comics to narrate history, respond to stereotypes, and tell new stories.

Instructor: LiLi Johnson

TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm

Have you taken previous Asian American Studies classes but want to dig deeper into a specific topic? Have you been looking for an opportunity to take what you’ve learned in Asian American Studies and apply that knowledge to a project of your own?

This class will build on and apply the themes and frameworks of Asian American Studies such as race, ethnicity, immigration and diaspora, gender and sexuality, postcolonialism, community formation, and justice. As a class community, each student will begin by selecting a topic of research based on their individual interests. Then, together, we will move through the steps of designing a research project, conducting research, and analyzing the findings. With the guidance of the instructor, projects can be in the form of academic scholarship, creative projects, or community initiatives. Creativity is encouraged! All students who have completed at least 1-2 courses in Asian American Studies are welcome!

Instructor: Lisa Ho

TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm

For the 2021 Grammys, BTS became the first KPOP group to receive a Grammy Nomination in the category of Pop Duo/Group Performance. BTS was not the first KPOP group to achieve commercial success in the United States nor will it be the last. Our globalized economy (and its accompanying technologies) has made it possible for cultural imports like KPOP to circulate across the United States and abroad with ease. In the last decade or so, American-based streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu have begun to offer films, television serials, and documentaries from South Korea, Mainland China, India, Japan, Thailand, and other Asian countries; radically challenging the geographical boundaries of the cultural content that is available to Asian Americans and segments of the Asian diaspora that have settled in English-speaking countries. Consequently, the popularity of these cultural productions has led to a noticeable increase of tourism to Asian countries by Asian Americans and non-Asians as well. Similarly, Asian American content has featured and emphasized the transnational connections between Asian Americans and their geographical origins in Asia and other places of the Asian diaspora. This overlap has created conditions for Asian Americans to develop identities that emphasize the global dimensions of their experiences, histories, and communities. As such, these transnational influences have complicated how we think about race, gender, sexuality, and other categories of identity; an impact that requires us to link the processes of global capitalism to the formation of identity politics. Lastly, this course examines how the consumption of these Asian cultural imports allows for larger conversations about how the histories of American imperialism, colonization, and militarism provided an infrastructure to facilitate this circulation in the first place.

Instructor: Lisa Ho

TR 2:00-3:15 pm

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) defines refugee “as someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence.” This definition represents the refugee as a victim, whose statelessness compels the need for resettlement within the nation-state. In the context of Asian America, this narrow construct of the refugee has overlapped with how Asians have been racialized, gendered, and sexualized in the United States. In response, this course utilizes the framework of critical refugee studies to expose how the violence of empire and militarism has created the conditions of mass displacement by centering the figure of the refugee as a disruptive force to the normalization of the nation-state. In addition, we will use the lens of critical refugee studies to center refugees as social actors whose lives are filled with complexity and intention. We trace these lives of intention and complexity through topics such as resettlement, assimilation, cultural representations, incarceration, and the second generation. The purpose of this course is to practice the analytics of critical refugee studies to better understand how the refugee populations of Asian America have empowered themselves to remember and resist the forces of empire and militarism.

Instructor: Peggy Choy

MW 12:05-1:45 pm

The course explores African-American and Asian-American connections and the creative possibilities of these connections through investigation of practice and theory of the following martial arts, exercise and dance forms: 1) chang quan (hard-style Chinese martial arts), 2) qigong (Chinese vital exercise form), 3) American boxing, and 4) urban vernacular dance (particularly breaking and house).

Remote, asynchronous | Instructor: Timothy Yu

Since the 19th century, “America” has often been defined by its relationship with “Asia,” through cultural influence, immigration, imperialism, and war. Traces the role of Asia and Asians in American literature and culture, from the Chinese and Japanese cultural influences that helped shape literary modernism to the rise of a distinctive culture produced by Asian immigrants to America and their descendants.

MW 12:05-12:55 pm | Instructor: Leslie Bow

Explores fantasy as a conduit of political meaning in Asian American fiction, graphic novels, anime, and art. Analyzes race as it circulates in visual mediums and literary texts. Engages issues such as stereotyping, caricature, and microaggressions; whitewashing, yellowface, and passing; race fetishism; cultural appropriation; multiracialism; kawaii or cute style; techno- orientalism and virtual Asians. Foregrounding fantasies of bodilessness, the course examines race as it is grafted onto nonhuman forms-objects, digital avatars, robots-at the borders of science and fiction. Examines how projections of the future reflect cultural anxieties about race, immigration, and Asian Americans.

TR 8:00- 9:15 am | Instructor: Cindy I-Fen Cheng

Examines the impact of colonialism, war, and capitalism on the movement of Asians to the U.S. Considers how racial, gendered, class, sexual, and national formations within the U.S. structured Asian immigration to North America.

TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm | Instructor: Yang Sao Xiong

Explores how Hmong’s participation in the Secret War that the U.S. waged in Laos shaped their experiences in the U.S., heightening the importance of Hmong Americans’ social, cultural, and political self-definition and in making known their contributions to the advancement of U.S. society.

MW 4:00-5:15 pm | Instructor: Jan Miyasaki

This course examines the history of Asian American coalition building. We will look at the formation of community organizations and pan-Asian organizations to promote political effectiveness in response to discrimination based upon race and national origin in order to promote and protect their constituents, as well as to provide the mutual assistance needed to survive in America. Transformation of individual identity will be explored.

TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm | Instructor: Lisa Ho

This course examines the conditions under which Asian Americans have sought political power, and the different forms of activism—electoral, cultural, radical—that they have engaged in to create alternative futures for themselves and for allied communities. While the course begins with the creation of Asian American Studies, the course will explore how Asian America has positioned itself within the current political landscape. In particular, we will focus on topics such as affirmative action, #blacklivesmatter, new media, #metoo, and other related matters.

MW 4:00-5:15 pm | Instructor: LiLi Johnson

This course examines theories and formations of family and kinship for Asian Americans across a range of historical, theoretical, and contemporary sites. Within Asian American Studies, the family is often assumed as a social unit of community formation defined by heterosexual reproduction. However, in this course we will examine how family and kinship have been used as sites for defining the very categories of race and gender that constitute Asian America. We ask, what is family and kinship and how is it affected by Asian American racial formation? How is race constructed through state policies and the meaning of the family, and vice versa? In what ways do constructions of kinship embody, reproduce, or challenge racialized constructions of gender and sexuality?

TR 4:00- 5:15 pm | Instructor: Lisa Ho

This course focuses on how the food culture of Asian America is an entryway point to understand the vibrant communities, complex politics, and rich histories that constitute this demographic. This course will explore the following questions: How does food allow for ethnic communities to express their identity? How does food allow for different generations to express their unique experiences while preserving the roots of the culture? How does food allows us engage in conversations about assimilation, community, and social constructions of difference? By using food to understand the complex formation of identity, we can also understand how the practices of systematic exclusion, racism, and xenophobia has influenced how Asian America has used the medium of food to cope, remember, and ultimately document these moments. Aside from consumption, we will also examine how Asian America has contributed to the agricultural culture and entrepreneurial tradition of the United States through their racialized and gendered labor. Lastly, the goal of this course is to use food as an avenue to bring attention to how Asian America has powerfully used the medium of food to crave a place for itself in the United States.

MW 2:30-3:45 pm | Instructor: Victor Jew

This one semester course is about food and Asian America(s), but it is about so much more. It’s about food processes that leave us clueless about where and how food gets to us. It’s about fetish. It’s about how different Asian derived communities get “stamped” with certain food items so some food dishes become equated with people. It’s about how Chinese immigrants in the 1870s were presumed to live on nothing but rice and were thereby deemed as living threats to the U.S. body politic. It’s about how Asian derived communities attempt to re-tell the narrative of their characterization in public culture and how they’ve used food to do so.

>TR 11:00 am-12:15 pm | Instructor: James McMaster

This course is an opportunity for students to study the specific qualities of queer and Asian emotional life in the United States. It asks questions like, How do those held by the categories of queerness and/or Asianness feel about themselves and the world, and how do others in the world feel about them in turn? Why do all of these people feel this way? And what historical, political, economic, and social circumstances have given rise to those feelings? Over the course of the past few decades affect theory—basically, the study of feelings, their ontology, their causes, and their effects—has emerged as a key explanatory framework for understanding what it is to affect and to be affected, to move and to be moved, to feel and to be felt. Students will spend the semester engaging with affect theory, alongside queer and Asian Americanist critique and cultural production through close readings, conversations, critical writing, and creative projects.Key theorists covered in the course include Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, José Esteban Muñoz, Karen Shimakawa, David Eng, Audre Lorde, and Martin Manalansan.Taking seriously the political stakes of studying affect and emotion, the ultimate aim of this course is to provide students with the tools to discuss how people feel, why they feel that way, whether they should feel otherwise, and how to make it so.

TR 2:30- 3:45 pm | Instructor: Chong Moua

In recent years, Southeast Asian American writers have garnered national recognition. In 2016, Vietnamese American author, Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his debut novel The Sympathizer. That same year, Hmong American poet, Mai Der Vang wont the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for her collection, Afterland: Poems. Both award-winning literary works explored the themes of U.S. empire, war, trauma, displacement, memory, family, and belonging while at the same time, drawing critical attention to how the figure of the “refugee” plays an important role in the cultural, historical, social, and political landscape of U.S. national memory. Using a variety of refugee texts, including memoirs, film, poetry, and art, this course explores these themes further.

TR 12:05-1:45 pm | Instructor: Peggy Choy

The course explores African-American and Asian-American connections and the creative possibilities of these connections through investigation of practice and theory of the following martial arts, exercise and dance forms: 1) chang quan (hard-style Chinese martial arts), 2) qigong (Chinese vital exercise form), 3) American boxing, and 4) urban vernacular dance (particularly breaking and house).