Spring 2023, Mondays, 4:00-7:00PM; Meets at MIT
This course examines works across a range of genres by Asian/American writers, filmmakers, and cultural producers focusing on the intersection of race, gender formation, and sexuality. We will put conceptions of feminism, queerness, and LGBT identity in conversation with ethnicity, citizenship, power, activism, art, politics, representation, race and resistance and collective as well as individual histories. As a class that focuses on film and television, literature, and stage productions we will close read texts as a means to discuss the politics of representation and how a text can inform the world and vice versa. The course will provide an overview of Asian American literature and film from the interdisciplinary perspective of Asian American Studies. The theoretical material is a mix of earlier debates in Asian American Studies and current discourses in order to map out the trajectory of the field. It is impossible to give a complete picture of Asian American literature, film, and theory in one semester given its rich history. This course offers a bird’s eye examination.
Faculty
Rani Neutill has taught Ethnic American literature at Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins University. She teaches classes in memoir at GrubStreet and creative writing and Asian American literature at Tufts University and Emerson College. She is the recipient of a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, ELLE.com, Al Jazeera English, CNN, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post and she has work forthcoming in The Los Angeles Book Review and a co-edited volume titled BTS: A Critical Reader that will be published through Duke University Press. She is working on a memoir about fractured identity and her relationship with her mentally ill Bengali immigrant mother.
Yuri Doolan (PhD, Northwestern University 2019) is Assistant Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies as well as inaugural Chair of Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies at Brandeis University. He is a historian whose work explores the lasting legacies and human consequences of US militarism in Asia and the Pacific.