History and Literature 90bg: Colonization, Globalization, and Cultures of Asian Diaspora(s)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2015

This course takes a cultural approach to connected histories of Asian diasporas, colonialism, and globalization as a result of various forms of colonialism, including U.S expansion in the Pacific from the late-nineteenth well into the twentieth centuries.  We look to performative and cultural arenas such as literary fiction, spectacles, mass media, and visual texts to examine efforts to strategically use discourses of race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and (trans)nationalism to structure and maintain colonial forces. At the same time, this class pushes us to consider how marginalized individuals and communities used the same arenas to resist forms of oppression and subjugation in various locations, spaces, and historical moments. We will explore historical developments thematically in order to address the ways in which the body, gender, race, and appearance inform processes of Asian/American identity formations, hegemonic subjugation, and resistance within U.S. colonial and neo-colonial contexts.