Transpacific Personalities: The Personal

Since the 1974 publication of the first anthology of Asian American writing, Aiiieeeee!, the field of Asian American Studies has been pulled in two different directions, simultaneously trying to articulate a coherent identity of, and place for, Asian American subjects while also articulating this coherence in relation to immigrant labor and history.

This introductory course will survey the way this tension, between personal coherence and collective historical experience, formally characterizes Asian American media and literature since the 1970s, in which the form of the personal essay is critically expanded and brought into conflict with the racialized history of Asian American immigrant experience. Beginning with Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (1994) and Colleen Lye’s America’s Asia (2005), this course will furnish students with an understanding of both the successive exclusion acts applied to different waves of East and Southeast Asian immigration to the United States, as well as the ways these exclusion acts produced, and were produced by, expanding forms of anti-Asian American racism. This framework of economic policy and racial form will then be used as a lens to investigate prominent texts across the Asian American canon (as well as outside of this canon) by authors such as Frank Chin, MaxineHong Kingston, Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Theresa Cha, Jessica Hagedorn, Wilfrido Nolledo, and Elaine Castillo.