AMST 125
Introduction to Asian American Studies Fall 2018
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

This course will offer students an introduction to the field of Asian American Studies. First, we will examine how history is shaped not only by laws and institutions but more significantly by people and social movements responding to the challenges of war, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, immigration, globalization, and white supremacy. Secondly, we will pay an immediate attention to the dynamic, narrative intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality/citizenship. We will question how the social, political, and economic differences produced by these categories help to make and remake the multiple dimensions of Asian America from within and without. Finally, our discussions will illuminate the contradictions of power and spaces for possibility that emerge in key moments — namely, how human actors strive to imagine, if not build visions and practices of the world in difference to the master narratives of American history and American exceptionalism. Our study will be supplemented with documentary screenings, oral histories, and personal memoirs.