FALL 2013 – AMS 354: Asian Americans and Public History/Memory

This upcoming semester, visiting professor Franklin Odo ’61 *75 will be teaching a seminar primarily focusing on two events, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Japanese American Internment during World War II, and the movements for redress of these events that emerged in subsequent decades. The course further discusses how legislation and the government response to these redress movements affected the targeted communities.

Prof. Franklin Odo is the founding director of the Asian Pacific American Program at the Smithsonian Institute and a prominent Asian American Studies activist. He co-edited Roots: An Asian American Reader, the main text used in the earliest Asian American Studies courses in the 1970s. Prof. Odo received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2012. In the 1990s, Prof. Odo was a visiting professor at Princeton and gave a talk sponsored by AASA and Whig-Clio in March, 2013.

This post is unfortunately late, but those interested still have a chance to sign up in September! Check out more details about the course at the Registrar’s website here.

SPRING 2013 – AAS 322: A History of Race in the United States

Gary Y. Okihiro
A History of Race in the United States
AAS 322

This semester, visiting professor Gary Okihiro is teaching an introductory history of race in the U.S., including the intersections of racializations, as social constructions, with imperialism and conquest, science and explanation, gender and sexuality, and geography and place, and the policing of those taxonomies and their borders and violations.

Prof. Gary Y. Okihiro is a prominent Asian American author and scholar. He is a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University in New York City and the founding director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. In 2012, Prof. Okihiro recieved the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies.

We strongly recommend this course for any students potentially interested in Asian American Studies, or just looking to expand their academic horizons!

Spring 2013 – ENG 223: Literature and Food

Anne A. Cheng
Literature and Food
ENG 223

“There are three important things in life. The first is to eat well, and…I have forgotten the others.”– Marquise de Sévigné

Food, like books, can sustain and celebrate life.  But also like books, food can serve as an agent and expression for discipline, fear, hunger, and loss.  This course explores both the joyful and the dark sides of eating and traces how “taste” informs the various ways in which we ingest the world.  We will study how consumption and its rituals can be simultaneously quotidian and extraordinary.  We will consider how the meeting of food and word (in novels, poems, plays, and the cinema) inform large social categories such as the nation, gender, race, ecology, internationalism, family, and, finally, the elusive yet endlessly seductive notion of sophistication.

With weekly topics such as “What Do Modernists Eat?,” “Women on the Edge”, “Lumps in My Throat,” “Parenting/Consuming”, “Ecology and Intimacy,” and more, we are bound to explore much which satisfies and challenges our appetites.  We will undertake creative and intellectual projects toward the “writing of food” and end the course with a cook-off, to which we will invite the faculty and staff of the Department of English.

Fall 2012 – MUS 255/EAS 255: Taiko Drumming Workshop

Noriko Manabe
Taiko Drumming Workshop: Japanese and North American Perspectives
MUS 255/EAS 255

Taiko: the art of the Japanese drum.

This course explores the socio-cultural meanings of taiko (Japanese drum), from its uses in traditional Japanese music (gagaku, kabuki, festival music) through its development as a choreographic ensemble in postwar Japan and a site for Asian-American identity. Students participate in a hands-on workshop, learning techniques and three pieces of traditional modern styles, and in seminars on the history and cultural implications of taiko in the Japanese and Asian-American experience.

Fall 2012 – ENG224: Asian American Literature and Culture

Anne Cheng’s Asian American Literature and Culture Class. Co-taught by Judge Denny Chin ’75 of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals.

Anne A. Cheng
Asian American Literature and Cultures
ENG 224 / AMS 304 / AAS 224

This course studies the relationship between law and literature by focusing on the roles that Asian Americans played in US constitutional history. We will examine cases involving Asian Americans that reflect on American policies on citizenship, immigration, civil rights, human rights, and foreign policy, and we will explore novels, plays, poems, and films that respond to these cases. We will also consider the invisible ways in which the law shapes our every day lives: how it structures our feelings, bodies, spaces, and the sense of the quotidian.