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Course Description for Fall 2009
ASIAN_AM Asian American Studies 392-0: Seminar in Asian American Studies
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Asian American Studies
392-0-20: Seminar in Asian American Studies : The American Century in Asia
Coordinator: Jinah Kim
Office address: 1897 Sheridan Rd #215
Office phone:
E-mail: jinah-kim@northwestern.edu
Office Hours:
Instructor: Jinah Kim
Office address: 1897 Sheridan Rd #215
Phone:
E-mail: jinah-kim@northwestern.edu
Office Hours:
Expected Enrollment: 20
COURSE DESCRIPTION: “The American Century” is a term popularized by Life editor Henry Luce and describes what he imagined as the utopic potential of an American global leadership made necessary by the decline of European empires in Asia, Africa, and Latin America after World War II. Indeed, the period
following World War II is characterized by unprecedented economic growth and wealth in the United States that is accompanied by the intensification of U.S. military, political, and economic internationalisms throughout the globe. In this interdisciplinary class we will study the history and representations of U.S. wars, economic and political development plans, and international humanist projects in Asia to map the tight connections wrought between these two spaces in constituting the American Century.
We will develop “intimacy” as an analytic to understand how wartime relations and post-war development projects rearrange domestic and gender practices as well as national culture, politics
and economy. We will study domesticity, sex-work, war brides, transnational adoption practices in the creation of discrepant cultural practices, contingent alliances, and transnational ties. In
addition to studying how power flows from the U.S. to Asia, we will also understand how U.S. notions of self, family, nation and culture have been and continue to be irrevocably affected and changed by its intimate relations with Asia since the end of WWII.
EVALUATION METHOD: Course requirements: One 15 minute presentation, one 2-3 page response paper, one long paper (10-15), attendance and participation.
READING: Primary Texts: Bulosan, America is in the Heart; Buck, The Good Earth; dir. Rogan, Sayonara; dir. Rogan, South Pacific; Burdick and Lederer, Ugly Americans;Phan, We Should Never Meet; Cha, Dictee; dirs. Lee and Lee, Camp Arirang.
Secondary Reading: Chapman, “The New Militarism and Purity”; Worcester, “The Mexican Question in the Light of Philippines Experience”; from Thomson, Stanley, Perry, Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia; from Rostow, An American Policy in Asia; Luce, “The First Great American Century”; from Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism; Costigliola, “Unceasing Pressure for Penetration: Gender, Pathology, and Emotion in George Kennan’s Formation of the Cold War”; Klein, “Family Ties and Political Obligation: The Discourse of Adoption and the Cold War Commitment to Asia; from Marchetti, Romance and the Yellow Peril; from Sturdevant, Pollock, Stoltzfus, Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia; from Rosca, State of War; from Fujitani, Yoneyama and White, Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s); from Manderson and Jolly, Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific; Rafael, “Colonial Domesticity: White Women and U.S. Rule in the Philippines”; Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea.”
Asian American Studies
392-0-21: Seminar in Asian American Studies : Asian American Literature & Lit Form
Coordinator: Susannah Gottlieb
Office address: Ste. 215
1897 Sheridan Rd.
Evanston Campus 2240
Office phone: 847-491-3091
E-mail: s-gottlieb@northwestern.edu
Office Hours:
Instructor: Susannah Gottlieb
Office address: Ste. 215
1897 Sheridan Rd.
Evanston Campus 2240
Phone: 847-491-3091
E-mail: s-gottlieb@northwestern.edu
Office Hours:
Expected Enrollment: 25
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This is a combined course with Comparative Literary Studies 301 (CLS 301). Asian American Literature and Literary Form:
The content of a literary text can never be divorced from its form. A radical statement of this interdependence of form and content can be found in Hegel’s dialectical proposition, “form is content” -- or, in Marshall McCluhan’s updated version: “the medium is the message.” Some literary traditions -- Asian American among them -- have been interpreted primarily from the perspective of their putative content; the specificity of historical experience tends to determine the direction of analysis. In this class, however, we will pay as much attention to the formal features of literary texts as to the historical worlds from which they spring. Alongside representative examples of Asian American experiments in genre, we will read critical writings that elucidate their modes of expression. We will also examine the manner in which the literary works under discussion challenge -- and even subvert -- the theories that help to explain them. The theoretical programs we will study include structuralism, narratology, rhetorical reading, and queer theory; among the critics we will read are Vladimir Propp, William Empson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Judith Butler. The literary texts will probably include works by Jessica Hagedorn, Darrell Lum, Joy Kogawa, Chang-Rae Lee, Gish Jen, and John Okada.
[Course Descriptions for Fall 2009] [Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences] [ASIAN_AM Asian American Studies]