Introduction to Asian American Literature

Who This Is For

Asian American artists, activists, community members, allies, and curious learners interested in Asian American literary history.

Course Description

This six-week course provides a brief introduction to Asian American literature, from the earliest writings in the Exclusion era to more contemporary work in the 21st century. We will approach this body of literature thematically, including labor, incarceration, war, and community, and trace how the political concerns of Asian American writers of the past reverberate in the writings of more present-day authors. In so doing, we'll see Asian American literature as a literary tradition and genealogy that is not only an expression of ethnic difference or diversity, but also a creative site of struggle where Asian American identity and politics are negotiated.

To start, we'll look at the debates, periodicals, and poetry during the invention of "Asian America" as a political coalition in the 1960s. Next, we'll take on thematic explorations of Asian American literature in pairs; possible pairings might include Carlos Bulosan and Rajiv Mohabir (labor), Janice Mirikitani and Solmaz Sharif (incarceration), and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Thi Bui (war). We'll conclude with a literary salon of sorts, where participants can share creative work (visual, written, or otherwise) and reflections on the class.

Instructor(s)

• Joe Wei

  Joe Wei is an assistant professor of English at the University of Georgia, with prior teaching experience at Indiana University-Bloomington and the University of Virginia. His research and teaching interests include Asian American literature, refugee studies, poetry and poetics, oral history, and game studies. Broadly speaking, he works on Asian American literary organizations and communities from the 1960s to the present, and his first book project is about Southeast Asian American poets' development of a distinctive, collective refugee politics in the institutional context of contemporary American poetry.