Join Professor Chu’s Asian American Literature course!
English 3960-10 (36721) Asian American Literature
MW 12:45-2 p.m.
Course Description:
This course complicates received ideas of “America” as a nation of blacks and whites by examining the writing of Americans of Asian descent. Our readings will examine what Asian American and Asian global writers have to say about growing up in Chinatown in the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion acts; Japanese imperialism and the internment of Japanese Americans; the bounds of assimilation and political representation for Korean Americans; and the costs and attractions of transnational migration and “flexible citizenship” in India, Pakistan, England, Hong Kong, and New York.
Asian Americans must tell their stories in dialogue with established discourses: from news and history to film and the genres of the bildungsroman and autobiography. We’ll read these coming-of-age stories and the competing and overlapping community stories interwoven with them, asking not only what it takes to “make a man” or a woman, but how authors tell their stories within a field of ideologically charged discourses.
English majors: the course can be used to fulfilll a 20th century or minority/postcolonial requirement. With special permission, it can be used to meet a theory/culture studies requirement.
For more information, contact Prof. Chu: pattychu@gwu.edu
