Asian American Studies
392-0-20: Seminar in Asian American Studies : Comparative Racial Formations

Coordinator: Shuji Otsuka
Office address: Crowe Hall 1-131 1860 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208-2166
Office phone:
E-mail: s-otsuka@northwestern.edu
Office Hours:

Instructor: Shuji Otsuka
Office address: Crowe Hall 1-131 1860 Campus Drive Evanston, Il 60208-2166
Phone:
E-mail: s-otsuka@northwestern.edu
Office Hours:

Expected Enrollment: 20

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans:
Comparative Racial Formations in U.S. History

The course provides an integrated and comparative approach to the history of racialized experiences and racial categories in the U.S. by examining three groups: Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans. Focusing on the first half of the twentieth-century, we will analyze the racialization of Asian ethnic minorities as both a gendered and classed process linked to Mexican American, African American, and other domestic racial formations. Readings will focus on racial formation as media representations, as legal constructs, as international labor migrations, and as U.S. involvement with Asia, Mexico, and sub-Saharan Africa. The course encourages students to think about the emergence of race and racial communities in broad conceptual terms, as intersecting systems of subordination and liberation, rather than as embodiments of competition among minority groups in the United States.

TEACHING METHOD: Discussion, student presentations, and films

EVALUATION METHOD: A student’s course grade will consist of two components: 1) informed participation each week (30% of final grade) and 2) four five-page analytical review essays (70%).

READING: Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2003).

Zaragosa Vargas, Labor Rights are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Racial Purity
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2001)

[Course Descriptions for Fall 2008] [Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences] [ASIAN_AM Asian American Studies]