Teaching

This course is an introduction to postcolonial theory and literature as an influential, controversial, and subversive field in English literary/cultural studies. The course will start with texts that introduce ideologies of imperialism; proceed through postcolonialism’s major modes of critique through themes of race, feminism, nationalism, language, hybridity, indigeneity, Marxism, etc.; and end with discussions of what postcolonialism looks like today. The ambition of the course is to give students a historical appreciation of postcolonialism’s impact on English literary/cultural studies and enough of a sense of postcolonialism’s critical vocabularies to prepare them for future projects.

This course inroduces students to theories and histories of Asian racialization from the fields of postcolonial, Asian American, and Asian studies. We will contemplate what kinds of global historical, cultural, and political forces shape, maintain, and challenge “Asiatic difference” and grapple with how anti-Asian racism upholds other systems of oppressions. We will moreover examine how Asiatic difference manifests in aesthetic texts from a variety of geographical contexts and, in doing so, decenters North America as the primary site through which to comprehend Asian racialization. 

In this course we will examine contemporary Asian diasporic fiction, poetry, and film in English. Through stories about movements within Asia and outside of it, we will discuss how our texts in question address, thematize, and aestheticize issues of migration and displacement; departures and arrivals; memories and ambitions; assimilation and racial difference; among others. While we will be reading contemporary texts, we will also be thinking historically about how structures of empire and global capitalism have led to the migration and displacement of Asians around the world.

This course explores the politics of Asian American literature of the late twentieth and twenty-first century. The broader goal of this course is to provide students with a critical vocabulary to comprehend and analyze the specificities of Asians as racialized subjects and, moreover, understand how the history of Asian racialization works within American systems of antiblackness, settler colonialism, and white supremacy. As scholars and critics have urged in the wake of the Atlanta massacre, we must understand how Asian American vulnerabilities are deeply connected to longer histories of British and Japanese imperialism, US militarism, and immigrant labor within racial capitalism. We will examine how writers represent, navigate, challenge, and resist these histories through their literary works. 

In this course we will study the relationship between colonialism and tourism through postcolonial, indigenous, and ethnic American literatures. These novellas, performances, and short stories—combined with theoretical readings from literary, postcolonial/decolonial, feminist, and critical ethnic/race studies—will provide us a critical frame to analyze tourism, arguably one of the most influential industries that shape the way we understand the rest of the world.