Overview of the course: Throughout this semester we will read works ranging from memoirs to graphic narratives to lyric collections to a spy novel that illuminate and illustrate the complex individual, familial, communal, and national histories that have conjured “Asian American” as a social formation, a political formulation, and a site of creative play and imagination. This course fulfills Haverford’s writing seminar requirement and offers an introduction to the Tri-Co Asian American Studies program. Bold faced texts are available via the bookstore system (as well as independent stores such as Powells); all other texts will be archived on Moodle.
• We will be reading two memoirs - The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston’s “memoir of a girlhood among ghosts,” and Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo’s graphic account of her family’s forced relocation and incarceration following Executive Order 9066 during WWII – to consider the impact of cultural expectations, national policies and international relations on individuals’ trajectories, familial formations, and the destruction/(re)constitution of communities.
• In our reading of two collections of poetry - Eric Tran’s The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer and Rick Barot’s Galleons – we will be focusing on the ways in which poetic forms offer can give shape to inchoate feelings and explore how language can reshape our understanding of the world.
• Throughout the term, we will be reading essays from Meena Avashia’s Another Appalachia: Coming up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place as well as stories by Jamil Jan Kochai and Viet Nguyen that engage in practices of worldbuilding and offer examples of code shifting and code breaking, alongside essays by Julia Alvarez, Marilyn Hacker, Cathy Park Hong, George Orwell, and Michelle Zauner that illuminate the different ways in which forms of representation arise out of a matrix of interpersonal cultural, and generational dynamics.
• We will close with Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, a novel that thematizes assimilation as spycraft, identity as performance, and politics as the ground of competing cultures.
• Thanks to the generosity of the Tri-Co in Philly program, we will be making a field trip to Philadelphia's Chinatown led by Asian Americans United (AAU) to take part in a walking tour that situates the history of the neighborhood through to current grass-roots organizing efforts in relation to gentrification and immigration, followed by lunch in Chinatown. The working date for the field trip is Saturday, February 14; we will firm up details in the first two weeks of class.
• We will be hosting visits from poet Iain Haley Pollock ’00 and Afghan journalist Fahim Abed and will be learning from their writing practices and professional trajectories
• We will be reading two memoirs - The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston’s “memoir of a girlhood among ghosts,” and Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo’s graphic account of her family’s forced relocation and incarceration following Executive Order 9066 during WWII – to consider the impact of cultural expectations, national policies and international relations on individuals’ trajectories, familial formations, and the destruction/(re)constitution of communities.
• In our reading of two collections of poetry - Eric Tran’s The Gutter Spread Guide to Prayer and Rick Barot’s Galleons – we will be focusing on the ways in which poetic forms offer can give shape to inchoate feelings and explore how language can reshape our understanding of the world.
• Throughout the term, we will be reading essays from Meena Avashia’s Another Appalachia: Coming up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place as well as stories by Jamil Jan Kochai and Viet Nguyen that engage in practices of worldbuilding and offer examples of code shifting and code breaking, alongside essays by Julia Alvarez, Marilyn Hacker, Cathy Park Hong, George Orwell, and Michelle Zauner that illuminate the different ways in which forms of representation arise out of a matrix of interpersonal cultural, and generational dynamics.
• We will close with Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, a novel that thematizes assimilation as spycraft, identity as performance, and politics as the ground of competing cultures.
• Thanks to the generosity of the Tri-Co in Philly program, we will be making a field trip to Philadelphia's Chinatown led by Asian Americans United (AAU) to take part in a walking tour that situates the history of the neighborhood through to current grass-roots organizing efforts in relation to gentrification and immigration, followed by lunch in Chinatown. The working date for the field trip is Saturday, February 14; we will firm up details in the first two weeks of class.
• We will be hosting visits from poet Iain Haley Pollock ’00 and Afghan journalist Fahim Abed and will be learning from their writing practices and professional trajectories
- المعلم: Theresa Tensuan