College Bulletin 2024-2025 
    
    Dec 14, 2024  
College Bulletin 2024-2025

ENGL 047A. Asian American Literature and Culture


Cross-listed as ASAM 047A  
Asians resurface in U.S. national culture from time to time, remembered anew amid perennial forgetting. To what extent does this (in)visibility betray a constitutive role in history? Through literary and cultural texts as well as ethnic historiography and criticism, this course charts the shifting place of Asians in modern America-as activists, transnational holders of capital, immigrants, family members, coolies, migrant laborers, colonized “nationals,” “internees,” refugees, diasporic/hybrid/futuristic subjects of color, alien suspects, and artists-by examining im/migration, empire’s wars, and the interracial future/diaspora. In providing a critical history of Asian America, this course expands the foundational concerns of Asian American studies as a field toward a transpacific and continental Asia/America while exploring minor adoptions of and resistances to Western politics, economics, and aesthetics. Readings may include Crazy Rich AsiansThe Year of the Dragon, Philippine-American War political cartoons, America is in the HeartObasanDicteeNight Sky with Exit WoundsTropic of OrangeHomeland Elegies, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Immigrant ActsCompositional Subjects, Coolies and CaneImpossible SubjectsThe Oriental ObscenePartly ColoredAlien Capital, and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation. This course may be combined with another in the 47 series into an Honors Preparation course (pending instructor approval).
20th/21st c.
Prerequisite: At least one W course. 
Recommended before or while taking the course: HIST 05B or HIST 010.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Eligible for ASIA, CPLT, GLBL-paired.
Fall 2024. Ku.
Fall 2025. Ku.
Catalog chapter: English Literature  
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature


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