This course explores how contemporary authors represent and intervene in the violent and often traumatic experiences engendered by imperialism and colonization in Asia and the Pacific. It will examine both past histories of colonization in locations such as New Zealand/Aotearoa, India, Korea, and Japan as well as ongoing occupations of Guam, Micronesia, and Hawai‘i. We will read authors such as Ishiguro, Hulme, Holt, Santos Perez, Keller, and Sidhwa for both the ways the attempt to represent what has been called by the “impossible history” of trauma, on the one hand, and also for the ways that narrative intervenes in and potentially empowers the subject to transform his/her relationship to the legacy of violence.