Cultural production—literature, drama, film, television, performance, and blogs, for example—has historically been the site where tensions among different ethnic and racial groups in the United States are exposed, resolved, exaggerated, or transformed. The artistic representation of such tensions has led, on one hand, to the affirmation of U.S. political and cultural hegemony, and, on the other, to acts of resistance to political and cultural dominance. We will survey in this course the representations of and by Asian American subjects in U.S. cultural production since the late nineteenth century. More specifically, we will explore the ways in which the cultural and literary production that arises out of the contradictions of U.S. democracy “displace,” in the words of Lisa Lowe, “the fiction of reconciliation”—the ways in which the literatures of Asian America “disrupt the myth of national identity by revealing its gaps and fissures.”

We will study the ways in which Asian American cultures bear a political function, not only for the ethnic or racial group it embodies or represents, but also for the larger body national politic it responds to, challenges, constitutes, and sustains. While attending to the often “resistant” function of some Asian America cultural production, we shall also examine how some of these cultural products, even as they render a critique of various hegemonies, instantiate others. Asian American cultural nationalism of the 1970s, for example, was both uncritically masculinist and militantly heteronormative. To that end, we shall play particularly close attention to the categories of gender and sexuality that comprise the heterogeneity and multiplicity of Asian America. Texts in the course may include novels, plays, poems, films, advertisements, blogs, musicals, historical documents, and scholarly articles.