ENGL 3674

AAPI and Empire

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025. The Catalog/Courses of Study 2025-2026 is scheduled to publish mid-June.

The term "AAPI" is often used as a U.S. demographic category for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, but what brings these disparate groups together? This course explores the interrelation between East Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas as geographies and ideological imaginaries shaped by power struggles and empire. How have U.S., Japanese, and other empires structured the exchanges, intimacies, transformations, and tensions linking peoples across the Pacific, Asia and the Americas? What are the social, cultural, political, and economic reverberations of colonial invasions, hot wars, cold war, migrations, and racial formations? How does thinking about and critiquing imperialism inform what we mean when we say "AAPI"? Drawing on visual media, fiction, poetry, historical documents, speeches, and more, this course will track the relationship between the personal and political and ask what subjects emerge from competing imperial modernities.

When Offered Fall or Spring.

Distribution Category (ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Comments This course counts towards the post-1800, Literatures of the Americas, and Literatures of the Global South requirements for English majors.

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