AMST 243
Asian/American and Black Literary and Cultural Thought
Last Offered n/a
Division II
This course is not offered in the current catalog

One durable legacy of white settler colonialism has been to its divide-and-conquer management of minority populations-an amazingly effective strategy still widely practiced in a variety of forms today. While Asian Americans have been deemed “model minorities” in contrast to “unmodel” minorities-namely, African Americans-and racial minorities have been pitted against one another in the oppression Olympics and on the issue of affirmative action, there has, in fact, been a long history of political, literary, and cultural thought that have joined blacks and Asian/Asian Americans, from W.E.B. Du Bois to current ideas about digital possibilities (and constraints). In this course we will examine the theory, political writings, art, music and literature that sprang from and attended the early Marxist-Communist fight for universal brotherhood; movements against colonialism, capitalism, and the Vietnam War; Yellow Power and Black Power; and topics such as black and Asian diasporas, Afro-futurism multiculturalism, “Afro-pessimism,” racial melancholia, and digital futurities.