How are Asia and the Pacific related? How are Asians and Pacific Islanders connected? This course explores how these geographical regions and groups are connected through a range of discourses, including the movement of peoples, ideas, and goods across the Pacific, from Asia to the U.S. and back. We will examine the role the transpacific plays in the scholarship and knowledge produced within Asian American Studies and American Studies.
What ideological “work” does the transpacific do in these fields? What discourses does it participate in, shore up, critique, and interrogate? What role has the Pacific—both its islands and its ocean spaces, its indigenous cultures, its histories of engagement with multiple imperial powers—played in the constitution of Asian America, in the constitution of the America, the sought-after home of Asian immigrants and the itinerant space for Asian migrants. We will also examine the newest free trade deal (pushed through by the U.S. Congress on its “fast-track” mode,) the alternatively much-reviled, much-touted Trans-Pacific Partnership. How does this trade deal cast forth yet another sense of the transpacific, of the “trans,” and of the Pacific itself which remains all but absent from its scope and concerns.
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