FYS 73 Claiming Asian America
“America’s dishonesty...has kept seven generations of Asian American voices off the air...We’re not new here.” So wrote the editors of the 1974 anthology Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. Their reminder that Asian voices were “not new” in the United States aimed to address a longstanding exclusion from American culture and literature. To define a literary Asian America meant powerfully rebuking images of the coolie, the exotic Oriental, the “yellow peril,” and the suspicious foreign enemy. At the same time, however, the emphasis on claiming--or belonging to--the US national space posed its own set of vexed ideas. In this course, we will take up the idea of “claiming America” as we examine the development of Asian American literature from the 19th century to the present. We will begin with the intertwined histories of Asian labor migration and US settler colonialism, tracking strategies of aesthetic representation across subsequent periods defined by policies of exclusion, immigration, and internment. Our later readings turn to the ways in which writers disclaim America through experiments with language and form. Open to first-year frosh only.