We begin with three questions: who is Asian American? What is Asian American? Where is Asian America? This course examines the formation of “Asian America” as cultural, historical, embodied, and political modes of life and living. Interrogating the who, what, and where of Asian American politics, aesthetics, and knowledges from a wide range of geopolitical locations, this course offers an introductory overview of the hemispheric and interdisciplinary nature of the field of Asian American Studies. We will engage with “Asian America,” broadly, as a body of found things to reject the homogenizing effects of a nation-based framework. Rather, we will investigate the sticky relations, tenuous alliances, and intimacies of place and timing that (un)ground the body to race, cultural memory, and home. Moreover, we will ask: what unique insights does Asian American studies offer for complex issues of our time such as economic inequality, ecological destruction, displacement and migration, and disease and virality? Looking at historical constructions of Asiatic figures—including the coolie laborer, the Third World revolutionary, the dog-eaters, the lepers, and the dragon ladies of colonial myth—we analyze, deconstruct, and reimagine what it means to walk through the world, as flesh and story, in and as Asian America.

This course examines the construction of liberal humanism, gender, and transnational American empire by way of the stomach by tracing the metaphors of eating, metabolics, and food-as-fuel through 20th century dietetics and industrial food production. Examining histories of diets and dieting, the foods created and circulated via U.S. militarism, and the impact of eugenics/Progressive era nutrition reform on our modern global food system, we will map the affective, material, and aesthetic afterlives of empire on the gut. Reading a collection of historical texts, visual media, and scientific journals, students are asked to think capaciously about the mundane act of eating and the benign concept of wellness.

This course engages with the study of objects under capitalism, or rather, the making of objecthood through the system known as racial capitalism. Reading and re-reading Marxist materialism alongside histories of enslavement, dispossession, ecological extraction, and colonization, we will consider: what does it mean to be made into an object—of study, desire, terror, commodity? Through a rigorous investigation into the sociality of capitalism, we will engage Third World Feminisms, Hemispheric Studies, and the Black radical tradition to ask: how is the raced/sexed/dispossessed body rendered into capital, labor, and object? How might we trouble the fraught relationship between matter and mattering? How can tune into the commodities that speak a different kind of future into existence?

Queer Femme Diasporas examines beautiful objects and the diasporic femmes who wield them. Taking a Feminist New Materialist approach to the study of migration, this course follows the objects that cluster around “femme” which both ground/unground the migrant body from “home.” Students examine the materiality of queer/unruly sexuality, identity formation through and against objecthood, and histories of home and leaving as it is reflected in hair, dress, and adornment. We ask: how have Third World, Transnational, Diasporic, Women of Color feminisms negotiated the symbolic imperatives of “woman” within discourses of the nation and nationalism (woman as placeholder for the nation, mother as nation, etc)? How have these engagements and entanglements with national discourses defined critical genealogies of feminist thought and practice? What kind of world does “femme” reach towards? Taking up familiar questions in feminist studies about feminine appearance, choice, and agency, we attend to the politics of desire, compulsion, and capital in a transnational world.