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student annotations of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha‘s Dictee.

ASA 347: “The Asian American Family” Fall 2018





























Teaching












Burnout: Contemporary Fictions of Work


Fall 2026 | Undergraduate Seminar

What is work? Who works? Why do we work so much? Must we? Why do we resent the grind yet stake our identities on the job? Automation promises freedom from toil, yet people work more, earn less, and feel burned out. This course examines how work became a self-evident good, and the twenty-first-century fictions that trouble or parody work's self-evidentness. We'll read stories of service work, temp work, the gig economy, finance and consulting culture alongside feminist and sociological critiques, asking what the modern work ethic values and exacts, what refusal looks like, and what it might mean to imagine life after work.

Sample reading list:
  • Marx, “Estranged Labour”
  • Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework
  • Hilary Leichter, Temporary
  • Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
  • Colson Whitehead, Zone One 
  • Leigh Claire La Berge, Fake Work

Other Information: 
Spanning realist, speculative, and satirical fiction from 2000 onward, possible authors include Mia Alvar, Octavia Butler, Elaine Castillo Alexandra Chang, Angie Cruz, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Joshua Ferris, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Tom McCarthy, Han Ong, Ed Park, and Olga Ravn. The final reading list will be confirmed on the first day of class. ENG Distribution Area: Post-1900, TC, DD, LCH To be added to the waitlist, please use this form:
https://forms.gle/BM9caPyx61TGhAj36







Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day


Fall 2026 | Junior Research Seminar

Kazuo Ishiguro—born in Nagasaki, Japan, raised in England, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize—is a novelist known for his virtuoso restraint, for prose that one critic calls "an incantatory flatness that belies its revelatory ability." This seminar will focus on Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), the Booker Prize-winning novel narrated by an English butler whose fastidious circumlocutions slowly reveal that he has wasted his life in service to a Nazi sympathizer and frozen out the woman he loved. An immigrant's vision of Englishness, the novel is widely considered the most heart-rending English novel of its generation. We will read closely for Ishiguro's masterful treatment of tone and narrative unreliability—a fusion, as the Swedish Academy put it, of Austen, Kafka, and Proust—through which the world-historical drama comes to appear to the servant. Ishiguro's approach to first drafts—to pursue imaginative breakthroughs that make revision all the more rewarding—will inform our own experiments in critical writing.







Marxism and Form: How To Read Dialectically


Fall 2025 | Graduate Seminar | Syllabus [PDF]

How to read history through form — not just around it? How do we move from culture to political economy, aesthetics to politics, and back? This seminar surveys the methods of dialectical materialism and Marxist aesthetic theory. Rooted in the Greek dialegein — from dia (through) and logos (discourse) — dialectics involves holding oppositions and articulating mediations between aesthetic form and social process. Through exemplary models of literary criticism, students learn to historicize texts across disciplines, engaging with topics such as racial capitalism, uneven development, gender, labor, and contemporary culture.

Sample reading list:
  • Marx, Grundrisse
  • Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
  • Hegel, Science of Logic
  • Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth
  • Christopher T. Fan, Asian American Fiction After 1965
  • Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim








Criticism and Theory: Racial Capitalism


Fall 2023 | Graduate Seminar | Syllabus [PDF]

What is the “racial” in racial capitalism? The question is posed by abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and we’ll take it up by exploring how cultural texts (literature, media, art) supply an exemplary analytic on capitalism’s racial logics. It’s easy enough to read texts for descriptions of racial capitalism. The more difficult task resides in developing a reflexive mode of criticism capable of grasping the mediation between race and capital that the form of the texts themselves enacts. To do this, we’ll learn from Black, Asian American, and Indigenous studies; Marxist aesthetic theory; & feminist, anticolonial, environmental critiques of capitalism.

Sample reading list:
  • Marx, Capital Vol 1 (Chapters 25-33)
  • Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism
  • Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
  • Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
  • Neferti Tadiar, Remaindered Life
  • Sylvia Wynter, Essays on Decolonization, 1967-1984

By application only. We’ll test arguments by consulting the literary cases ourselves. Additional readings may include W.E.B. Du Bois, Stuart Hall, Jairus Banaji, Nikhil Pal Singh, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Radhika Desai, Colleen Lye, Jodi Kim, Robert Nichols, and Patrick Wolfe. The seminar will host a parallel colloquium/reading group, with guest speakers, devoted to close readings of Chapters 25-33 of Marx's Capital. 






Literary Form, Social Process: A Graduate Seminar in Marxist Aesthetic Theory


Spring 2022 | syllabus

Literary form, social process—how, exactly, do we read and move from one to the other? What forms of knowledge and scales of textual analysis does a reflexive reading of the literary and the social enable? Through a focused survey of Marxist aesthetic theory, this course engages students in the problem of "mediation"—understood expansively as the dialectic between literature and reality, form and history, and aesthetics and politics. We will read canonical as well as recent historical materialist approaches to race, genre, empire, and other world systems to develop interdisciplinary tools for writing about economic mediations of culture.

Graduate students will have the opportunity to test seminar ideas and methods in relation to the archives of their projects. If you are a literature student who wants to design a dissertation that engages with a non-literary discipline (history, political economy, etc.), this is a good course for you.






Asian American Literature and Culture


Spring 2021

What is the relationship between race and genre? Through a survey of major works and debates in Asian American literature, this course examines how writers employ a variety of generic forms--novels, comics, memoirs, film, science fiction--to address issues of racial and ethnic identity, gender, queerness, memory, immigration, and war. By placing racial formation in relation to social, economic, and intellectual developments, we will explore the potential of literary texts to deepen our historical understanding of Asians in the U.S. and beyond, and probe into what labeling a work of literature as "Asian American" allows us to know and do.

ASA 224 / ENG 224 / GSS 226







Model Minority Fictions


Fall 2020

Where did the stereotype of Asian Americans as model minorities—overachieving whiz kids, industrious workers, “tiger mothers,” “crazy rich” Asians—come from? What accounts for the model minority myth’s persistence today? How has its representational scheme changed over time? Does model minoritism have a literary (and not only social) history? By reading across fiction, visual culture, and economic history, this seminar traces the changing definitions of Asians in the US from “yellow peril” to model minorities: from the myth’s wartime origins, to the birth of American neoliberalism, and onward to the global rise of Asia in the 21st century.

ASA 324 / AMS 324 / ENG 244






Global Novel


Fall 2019, Spring 2022


What happens to narrative when writers aspire to write the world? How has globalization transformed not only the way novels are produced but also the internal form of the works themselves? We'll read novels that overtly strive for a fuller picture of some social or conceptual whole (e.g., migration, climate change, labor, the Internet), especially where they thematize the impossibility of such a project. Students will learn interdisciplinary methods for reading literature's relation to society by examining how writers play with scale, link parts to wholes, and provincialize worlds while rendering the seemingly provincial or mundane worldly.

ENG 444 / ASA 444 / AMS 443






Introduction to Asian American Studies


Spring 2019, Fall 2021 (syllabus)


This course surveys critical themes in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, including perspectives from history, literature, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies. It develops an account of Asian racialization beyond the black-white binary in the context of US war and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands, settler colonialism, globalization, migration, and popular culture. Who or what is an “Asian American”? How have conceptions of Asian America changed over time? How do cultural forms such as literature and film add to an understanding of Asian American identity as a historically dynamic process and social relation?

ASA 201






The Asian American Family


Fall 2018


This seminar examines the emergence and transformation of the Asian American family as a social form. We will investigate how US labor demands and legal restrictions on immigration and citizenship militated against the formation of Asian American families, and how paper sons, military wives, refugees, adoptees, and LGBT family experiences eluded norms of kinship. We will also study the significance of the intergenerational trope in Asian American literature, and how writers responded to neoliberalism's remaking of the "Asian" family according to the model minority myth.

ASA 347 / AMS 347 / ENG 426 / GSS 358