Asian Pacific American Studies... Courses
Archived Course Lists
Fall 2007 Courses
Survey Courses
To be announced
Electives
AMST 201-4: Language in the U.S.
Ashley Williams
MW 1530-1645
Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. is not (and never has been) linguistically homogenous: from dying and revitalized Native American languages to newly arrived immigrant languages, from regional and social dialect variation to innovation among adolescents and Hip Hop, the American language situation is diverse and changing. This course invites students to investigate this not-quite-melting-pot variety both through readings in current research and through small-scale field research. Topics covered in the course will include the origins and distinctions of American English, language controversies such as Ebonics and the English-Only movement, research in language attitudes and discrimination, topics in bilingualism and education, plus the latest studies in language issues involving different ethnicities, genders, sexualities, ages, and social classes. In this course we will pull material from a variety of sources (including films, literature, the media, and recent studies), and will employ a variety of approaches (linguistic, anthropological, sociological, historical, and more) as we investigate and debate what is uniquely "American" about the language situation in the United States.
EDLF 555 Multi-cultural Education
Robert Covert
T 1230-1515
T 1600-1845
W 1600-1845
Prepares students to deal with the increasingly multicultural educational milieu. Emphasizes the process of understanding one's own bias and prejudices and how they effect the school and classroom learning environment. Included are readings, class discussions, field projects, journal writing, and other methods of directed self explorations.
ENMC 481D Asian-American Drama
Lotta Löfgren
TR 1530-1645 TR
This course surveys the rich and varied plays that we can sort under the rubric Asian American drama. We will engage in a close reading of the plays and focus on a few larger issues: How do we define Asian America? Is it a useful term? How do these plays relate to the mainstream and to the dramatic traditions of the playwrights' countries of origin? How must we alter our understanding of drama in order to appreciate these plays as fully as possible? In addition to the plays, we will read a broad spectrum of critical essays, which will help to develop strategies for writing research papers. We will read plays by Wakako Yamauchi, Ping Chong, David Henry Hwang, Philip Kan Gotanda, Velina Hasu Houston, Dmae Roberts, Elizabeth Wong, and others.
ENMC 483B Postcolonial Modernities
Mrinalini Chakravorty
TR 1100-1215
ENAM 358 U.S. Literature and Citizenship
Victoria Olwell
TR 1100-1215
How has literary writing shaped conceptions of citizenship? What resources does literature provide for thinking about the kinds of inclusion -- and exclusion -- that citizenship defines? In this course, we'll explore how U.S. literature has "imagined" national community, to borrow Benedict Anderson's famous term. We'll define citizenship in multiple ways: as formal incorporation in the state, as civic participation, as a form of subjectivity, as a condition of feeling, and as cultural inclusion, to name just a few of the most important. In part, our course will consider the thematics of citizenship in selected literary texts from the late eighteenth century through the present day. We'll see how literature has provided a space of conversation where conceptions of national community could be formed and disputed. But, we'll also see literature as itself a technology of citizenship, one that produces relations among readers and styles of subjectivity that are themselves instances, rather than reflections, of citizenship. Our literary readings will be clustered around several areas of struggle over the terms of citizenship; these include national formation, race, gender, immigration, sexuality, labor, and the security state. Literary readings will likely include Charles Brockden Brown, Weiland; essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson, short stories by Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; William Wells Brown, Clotel; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; women's suffrage plays, poems, and fiction; the film Mildred Pierce, Audre Lorde, Zami, A New Spelling of My Name, Tony Kushner, Angels in America, and Gish Jen, The Love Wife. We'll also read a few pieces of recent theory and criticism.
ENCR 481A Race, Space & Culture
Marlon Ross and Ian Grandison
T 1830-2100
Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, this interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We'll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldua, Oscar Newman); through case studies (e.g., National Geographic documentary, Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits (Monticello, Vinegar Hill, Woolen Mills). Requirements include a midterm and final exam, two brief critical essays, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project.
HIUS 315 United States Society and Politics, 1900-1945
Lori Schuyler
MW 900-950
This course will explore major currents in American life during the first half of the twentieth century. Major topics of the course will include the growth of the federal government, the changing nature of work in an industrializing economy, efforts by women and African-Americans to secure the full benefits of citizenship, and the effects of two world wars on the American home front and American civil liberties. Grades will be based on participation in weekly discussion sections, as well as one five-page paper, a midterm, and a cumulative final exam. Assigned Readings will include a mix of fiction, personal narratives, and scholarly monographs. Required titles may include:
- American Mosaic, Morrison and Sabusky eds.
- The Long Day: the Story of a New York Working Girl, Dorothy Richardson
- The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois
- Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners and the Great Migration, James R. Grossman
- Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man, Robert McElvaine
- To Make My Bread, Grace Lumpkin
- Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese-American Family, Yoshiko Uchida
ANTH 355 Transforming Everyday Life in America
Fred Damon
MWF 1100-1150
Taking a production and exchange orientation to society, this course uses anthropological models to analyze aspects of the US experience in North America and its extension into the world. The models will be drawn from the anthropological analysis of exchange, rites of transition, sacrifice and mythology. The course will be organized in two parts. The first will provide a journalistic introduction to United States culture focusing on its financial/productive center, political institutions, and national ideologies. Anthropological, i.e. analytical, models will be reviewed as part of this introduction. The second part will examine the place of war, athletics, and movies in US culture. The collective readings of this second part are to be used by each student as a point of departure for his or her own research project and paper. Several short thematic and response papers will organize the first part. A research paper anchors the second part. Students must enroll in a section of 355D. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement. Anthropology majors or those in allied disciplines (e.g. History, American Studies)
Theory
Note: Because APAS theory courses also serve as requirements for other majors and often have other pre-requisites, it is strongly recommended that you contact the professor before enrolling in the course. If you have already taken an eligible theory course that you need to count towards your major, you may substitute an APAS elective for your theory requirement with the APAS Director's permission.
ANTH 301 The History And Theory Of Anthropology
Susan McKinnon
TR 1230-1345
This course will provide a survey of anthropological theory from the late 19th-century up to the present. We will explore a diverse range of anthropological approaches developed over the course of the century, including: 19th-century evolutionism, Boasian cultural anthropology, British structural-functionalism, French structuralism, British symbolic anthropology, American cultural materialism and neo-evolutionism, later American cultural anthropology, feminism, and post-colonial and post-modern theories. We will be concerned to understand these approaches not only as theoretical frameworks for understanding other cultures, but also as cultural and historical productions, in themselves. The discussion session is obligatory. This is a required course for anthropology majors.
ENCR 300 Contemporary Literary Theory
Rita Felski
TR 1230-1345
This course is an introduction to the following areas of literary and cultural theory: structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, feminism, African-American and postcolonial theory, queer theory, and cultural studies. It assumes no prior knowledge of these areas. Because this is a survey course, we will cover a large, diverse, and often difficult body of material at high speed. To help you make sense of the frameworks and concepts you encounter, the course will combine lectures with class discussions and with application of specific theories to literary examples.
ENCR 481C: Feminist Criticism and Theory
Susan Fraiman
TR 1230-1345
An introduction to American feminist criticism and theory. This course pairs novels and other works by women with critical essays in order to contrast diverse feminist approaches. I expect to explore such themes as looking/voyeurism, mother-daughter relations, mobility/migration, incarceration/escape, feminist anger/violence, and conflicts/commonalities among women. We will also broach such theoretical issues as the uses/dangers of identity politics, the definition of a lesbian poetics, autobiography as a genre, feminist theory versus queer theory, canon formation/canonicity, the meanings of third-wave feminism, and the way gender intersects with other axes of analysis (race, sexuality, class, etc.). Possible primary texts (still very tentative) include Jane Eyre, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Well of Loneliness, Zami, Mona in the Promised Land, a contemporary film, and a popular romance. Theorists studied will range from Laura Mulvey to Judith Butler. 5-page paper, 10-page paper, and a final exam. Please contact me in advance if you would like to be put on my waiting list.
SOC 341 Race And Ethnic Relations
Milton Vickerman
MW 1400-1515
Introduces the study of race and ethnic relations, including the social and economic conditions promoting prejudice, racism, discrimination, and segregation. Examines contemporary American conditions, and historical and international materials.
Transnational
ANTH 316 Contemporary Hindu Culture
Ravindra Khare
M 1400-1630
A discussion of contemporary (i.e. mostly post-independence) Hindu society, culture and politics by explicating interrelated aspects of (a) traditional or normative Hinduism; (b) the changing Hindu caste-kinship-family world; (c) position of women, Dalits and children; (d) major Hindu rituals, festivals, ceremonies, and worship; (e) Hinduism and Indian democracy; and (f) Hinduism in Indian film and television. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.
ANTH 363 Chinese Family and Religion
John Shepherd
TR 1530-1645
This course will introduce students to anthropological analysis of the traditional Chinese forms of the Chinese family and popular religion, and their modern transformations. Topics to be covered include the dynamics of Chinese marriage and domestic life, gender roles, the religious underpinnings of Chinese family life in ancestor worship and the Chinese cult of the dead, marriage rituals, and the cult of filial piety. The forms of temple worship, the interaction of the Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian traditions, and the shamanic tradition will also be covered. Finally, attention will be paid to the changing role of the family and religion in 20th- and 21st-century Chinese life. This course will satisfy the Second Writing Requirement. Meets College's Non-Western Perspective Requirements. Must have completed one course in history or the social sciences.
HIEA 203 Modern China
Bradly Reed
MW 1000-1050
This course is about the revolutionary transformation of the world's oldest empire into the world's largest socialist state. It is about the people, personalities, and events that have given Modern Chinese history its dramatic and often tragic tone. It is also about the social, political, and cultural currents that lay beneath these more visible manifestations of change and the profound effect these forces have had on the Chinese people. Following a brief consideration of the political and social institutions of the last imperial dynasty (the Qing, 1644-1911), we will examine the interaction of foreign aggression and domestic upheaval that led first to the fall of the imperial order and the establishment of a Republic in 1911 and then to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The final month of the semester will then be devoted to the post-'49 era under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), a period that has been described as the most thoroughgoing attempt at revolutionary social transformation in world history. We will close with a look at the post-Mao reform era, the emergence of China as a world power, and several of the major issues and challenges facing China today. Weekly reading assignments, drawn from a survey textbook as well as other secondary and translated primary sources, will average about 150 pages. Grades for the course will be based on a mid-term exam (25%), a final exam (30%), an eight to ten-page essay (30%), and attendance and participation in discussion sections (15%).
HIEA 207 Japan From Susanno To Sony
MWF 1100-1150
HIEA 210 Pre-Modern and Modern Korea
Ronald G. Dimberg
MWF 1300-1350
HIEA 210 will cover the history of Korea from 1886 into the first decade of the 21st century. During the course of the semester we shall discuss the consequences for Korea of the end of the traditional East Asian order in the late 19th century, the characteristics and consequences of the period of Japanese colonial rule, the divergent routes followed in the north and the south following liberation in August of 1945, developments within the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, relations between the two countries, and prospects for reunification. Reading material will include Korea Old and New: A History, The Making of Modern Korea, Korea: A Religious History, Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood; Creative Women of Korea; and excerpts from such books as Inter-Korean Relations: Problems and Prospects and Korea at the Center. The course grade will be based on two essays (25% each) and two one-hour examinations (25% each).
HISA 203 History of Modern South Asia
Neeti Nair
TR 1400-1515
South Asia is home to diversity: of histories, religious traditions, languages, kinds of polities, architecture, cuisine, and styles of music, clothing and dance. It is a place where history meets the present in constantly changing ways. In this course we will read and discuss a wide range of sources about South Asia's rich and contentious past. Major topics include conflict and accommodation in the Indo-Islamic world; change and continuity under colonial rule; competing ideas on the shape and substance of a new India; and the Partition of the subcontinent. The following textbooks will be available in the bookstore: Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy and Ramachandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: the Indian History of a British Sport. Other required readings consisting of primary and secondary sources will be placed on toolkit. Films will also be used to accompany textual materials. Requirements include attendance and active participation in class; a book review; a midterm exam; and a final exam. This course is the first of a two-semester sequence in Modern South Asian history. In the spring we will focus on Twentieth century South Asia.
HISA 403A Imperial Encounters: Rules and Lives in Colonial India
Neeti Nair
W 1300-1530
The 'jewel' of the British Empire, India presented the officers of the English East India Company with incomparable challenges and opportunities. In this course, we move from an emphasis on political narratives of conquest to an examination of the social changes wrought by colonization. British rule brought with it immense changes in law, 'custom', and the practice of religious traditions; new understandings of race and caste; transformations in rural and urban landscapes; the creation of new diasporas; new debates and institutions in the public sphere; and new notions of style and etiquette. In the process to create an alternative to colonial rule, members among the colonized appropriated, subverted and resisted strategies of imperial control. We revisit the debates on the changes introduced by colonialism by drawing on a vast corpus of primary and secondary literature, fiction and some film. There are no text books for this course. About two hundred pages of reading consisting of chapters from books and journal articles will be placed on toolkit every week. We will read the works of a wide range of historians and anthropologists such as C.A. Bayly, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bernard Cohn, Vasudha Dalmia, Ranajit Guha, Thomas Metcalf, Radhika Singha and Emma Tarlo. Active participation in class (20%); weekly one-page position papers (20%); a short essay of 10 pages (20%) and a final essay of 20 pages (40%) will constitute the course requirements. This course fulfils the second writing requirement.
JPTR 322/522: The Modern Japanese Canon: Women, Nature & Society
Michiko Wilson
W 1400-1630
Introduction to the modern Japanese canon (1890's to the present). Writers studied include Natsume Soseki, the first modern writer to delve into the human psyche; Mori Ogai, the surgeon-turned writer; Rynosuke Akutagawa, the consummate writer of short stories; Shiga Naoya, the "god" of "I-Novel" Japanese fiction; Yukio Mishima, whose seppuku suicide caused a sensation world-wide; Endo Shosaku, the Christian writer; two Nobel laureates, Yasunari Kawabata, the pure aesthetician, and Kenzaburo Oe, the political gadfly. Meets Non-Western Perspective & Second Writing Requirement.
SATR 201 Remembering Indias Partition
Mehr A Farooqi
TR 1100-1215
The readings for this course have been put together with the premise that literature, even that which is written at the height of nationalist struggles, does not relate the exact same story that nationalism does. The readings for this course present a view of pre-partition and post-partition India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, especially through the novels of Muslim South Asian writers like Abdullah Hussein and Intezar Hussain.
PLCP 351 Chinese Politics
Brantly Womack
MW 1530-1645
General introduction to Chinese politics in its societal context. Conveys a concrete appreciation of China's societal reality and how it interacts with the political system. Covers China's changing role in Asia and the world. Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or the history of China. Course meets Non-Western Perspectives Requirement.
PLCP 363 Politics Of India and Pakistan
John Echeverri-Gent
TR 1100-1215
Surveys political development in India and Pakistan examining the process of nation-building, the causes of democratization and authoritarian rule, the development of ethnic and religious conflict, environmental politics, the political impact of cultural globalization, and gender-related political issues. Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or study of history and society in South Asia.
Summer 2007 APAS Courses
Electives
MUSI 208D Music In Asian America
Wendy Hsu
MTWRF 1030-1245
Jul 12, 2007 - Aug 09, 2007
This interdisciplinary course explores the musical lives of Asian Pacific Americans (APA's) as well as the music by APA musicians in 20th and 21st century U.S. We will read ethnographic and historical studies of musical practices of APA's in jazz, hip hop, Taiko drumming, karaoke and Christian churches. We will also read criticism of Asian American musical representations such as Yoko Ono, Cibo Matto, William Hung, and Yo Yo Ma while analytically engaging with their music and image.
Theory
PLPT 302 Modern Political Theory
George Klosko
MTWRF 1030-1245
May 14, 2007 - Jun 08, 2007
Studies the development of political theory from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century.
SOC 341 Race and Ethnic Relations
Matthew Hughey
MTWRF 0800-1015
Jul 12, 2007 - Aug 09, 2007
Introduces the study of race and ethnic relations, including the social and economic conditions promoting prejudice, racism, discrimination, and segregation. Examines contemporary American conditions, and historical and international materials.
Transnational
ANTH 262 Bollywood: Indian Popular Cinema
HL Seneviratne
MTWRF 1300-1515
May 14, 2007 - Jun 08, 2007
This course deals with the world's largest film industry, the popular Indian cinema, known as "Bollywood." It provides historical and cultural context for the genre and makes a case for the need to understand it on its own terms rather than on those used in discussions of international cinema.
HIEA 210 Korean Culture and Institutions
Ronald Dimberg
MTWRF 1030-1245
Jun 12, 2007 - Jul 10, 2007
This course will cover the history of Korea from the late 19th century into the early 21st century: challenges to the territorial integrity of Korea in the late 19th century as the Japanese and Western powers 'opened' Choson to the outside world, the rise of Korean nationalism, Japanese colonization, post-World War II social, political, and economic developments in both South and North Korea, and the role of Christianity throughout the 20th century. Course meets Non-Western Perspectives Requirement.
HISA 312 Women and Power in Indian History
Richard Barnett
MTWRF 1030-1245
Jun 12, 2007 - Jul 10, 2007
Surveys the evolving definitions and roles of women in the major social and cultural traditions of South Asia, i.e., India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Course meets Non-Western Perspectives Requirement.
Archive of past semesters' APAS courses
Because APAS is still developing as a program, its course offerings are constantly in flux. Please look at these listings of past courses to get a sense of what classes typically count towards the APAS minor.
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