Courses

This course is a survey of Asian North American literature and its contexts.  To focus our discussion, the course centers on examining recurring cycles of love and fear in Asian North American relations from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. We will first turn to what became known as “yellow peril,” one effect of exclusion laws that monitored the entrance of Asians into the United States and Canada during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the corresponding phenomenon of Orientalism, the fascination with a binary of Asia and the West. The second section of the course will focus on how Asian North American authors respond to later cycles of love and fear, ranging from the forgetting of Japanese internment in North America and the occupation of the Philippines; to the development of the model minority mythology during the Cold War. The final section will examine intimacies and exclusions in contemporary forms of migration, diaspora, and community communities.