ENGL 374
Cities of the Anglophone Chinese Imagination
Last Offered Spring 2008
Division II Exploring Diversity Initiative
Cross-listed AMST 305 / COMP 303 / ASST 305
This course is not offered in the current catalog

The recent fascination with all things “diasporic,” “global,” “transnational,” and “cosmopolitan” has shifted the emphasis away from conceiving of ethnic literatures solely, or primarily, as sub-categories of national literatures. A focus on “horizontal” rather than “vertical” ties re-frames our thinking about minority literature while also raising new issues. For example, what exactly is shared by subjects in a given diaspora? Does the term “diaspora” necessarily invoke the specter of racial essentialism? What happens to the category of race when one moves away from local politics? Is the idea of a diasporic subject much less vexing than the idea of, say, a racially minoritized person? How important a role does the shared English language play in these diasporas? In this course, we will look at the works of a specific diasporic literary group–English-language Chinese writers (in this case, Chiang Yee, Louis Chu, Chuang Hua , Evelyn Lau, Shirley G. Lim, Pamela Lu, Alvin Lu, Timothy Mo, Fred Wah, Ouyang Yu)–as a means to think about the nature of the “diasporic” and the “global.” We will focus on two types of sites: 1) geographic-mostly cities and urban areas: San Francisco, NYC, Taipei, Melbourne, Kuala Lumpur, London, Vancouver, etc.–which function as material spaces and places of the imagination, and 2) linguistic–i.e., the space of the English language.