Asians in America

This course examines the history and politics of Asian communities in the United States. It is designed to help students think critically about the familiar tropes of “exclusion” and “model minority” in order to understand how Asian communities have historically been situated (by themselves and others) not only between the black-white binary but also in relation to their real and imagined links to their natal places. The course will give students intellectual tools to analyze and understand the politics of the present with the resurgence of anti-Asian racism and the increasing political mobilization of Asian communities, most recently through affirmative action, education politics, #Asians4BLM, and #Stop AAPI Hate.

With the recent rise of anti-Asian racism in the United States, individuals of Asian descent across the country have become targets of race-based violence and hate crimes, sometimes with fatal results. At the same time, Asian communities have not remained unaffected by the larger uprisings for racial justice by Black Lives Matter.  Some Asians have allied themselves with Black activists and forged cross-race solidarities, while others have come down on a different side of the racial political landscape, as demonstrated by the recent San Francisco school board recall and the anti-affirmative action cases pending before the Supreme Court.

These issues may seem as if they have emerged from nowhere. But if you take the long view (as we do), these issues look less like unexpected eruptions than the return, reemergence, and reformulations of the exclusion and othering that has been part of the Asian experience in the Americas since the first migrants came in the 1840s. Then, as now, the exclusion and othering of Asians have resulted in structures that reinforce White dominance and anti-Blackness, trapping Asians in a racial caste system on which they are both victims and perpetrators of racism.

More information can be found at our own class website! https://sites.google.com/view/asiansinamerica/home

Inside the Classroom

The course has two through lines informing the work through the semester. The first is historical context. This course revisits the familiar story of immigration but tells it in different ways. First, using the global rise of anti-Asian “Yellow Peril” discourse, it explores how the legal architecture of 19th century Asian exclusion contributed to the emergence of the U.S. immigration-carceral state of today.  Furthermore, this course upends the traditional narrative of the hard-working immigrant by exploring Asian immigration less as an issue of American history and more from the perspective of Asian history, which makes visible the persistent and consequential transnational identifications of Asian communities with their natal places. By decentering the United States, the course shows that Asian communities had priorities other than “belonging” to the U.S., even as some desired to stay in order to avail themselves of American resources.  Rather than simply viewing exclusion and Japanese incarceration as a story of the denial of rights, this course also asks how this history of exclusion and violence shaped and conditioned Asian communities’ political horizons and expectations.

The second is an emphasis on politics. The interrogates the emergence of racial justice moments within and between communities of color, including a pan-Asian movement modeled on and inspired by global decolonization movements and the U.S. Black freedom struggle. By looking at how and why activists of color forged these movements, it considers the possibilities for cross-racial solidarity today, as the United States becomes an increasingly multicultural nation. The course ends with a consideration of what a global racial justice movement might look like in a world marked by neoliberalism and an ascendant Chinese state. 

Throughout this course, recent racial controversies in U.S. politics are linked with historical episodes of the Asian American experience to illuminate how Asian communities have experienced and negotiated structural exclusion and White supremacy. For instance:

Current political issue

Historical issue

AAPI Hate, Muslim ban, anti-immigrant sentiment

“Yellow Peril” discourse and Asian exclusion

Affirmative action (Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admission v. University of North Carolina)

Japanese and Chinese community formation in the 1920s-30s

“Comfort women” issue in the U.S.

2nd Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945)

The “model minority” myth and racial triangulation

Japanese redress movement of the 1980s

#AsiansForBLM versus the Asian American Far Right

Third World Liberation Front and the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s

Outside the Classroom

Two community trips will help students to connect what they learn in the classroom. Over Fall Break, the class will travel to Washington, D.C. Over Spring Break, the class will travel to Los Angeles, California. During the trip to Los Angeles, the class will visit the Manzanar National Historic Site, one of ten camps where the US government incarcerated Japanese immigrants ineligible for citizenship and Japanese American citizens during World War II.

Research and Capstone Project

Students will partner with the Student Center for Equity and Inclusion to design programming for the campus community.

Sample Course Readings

  • Erika Lee, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and Asian Exclusion in the Americas.”
  • Louise Cainkar, "Fluid Terror Threat: A Genealogy of the Racialization of Arab, Muslim, and South Asian Americans."
  • Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943
  • Azuma Eiichiro, “Mercantilists, Colonialists, and Laborers: Heterogeneous Origins of Japanese America”
  • Ichioka Yuji, “Japanese Immigrant Nationalism: The Issei and the Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945”
  • Deenesh Sohoni, “Unsuitable Suitors: Anti-Miscegenation Laws, Naturalization Laws, and the Construction of Asian Identities.” ​
  • Daniel Widener, “Perhaps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked?" Asia, Asian America, and the Construction of Black California.” 
  • Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, “The Formation of Asian American Nationalism in the Age of Black Power, 1966-75.”
  • David M. Reimers, “An Unintended Reform: The 1965 Immigration Act and Third World Immigration to the United States.”
  • Eric K. Yamamoto, “What’s Next?: Japanese American Redress and African American Reparations.” ​
  • Sharon S. Lee, “Over-Represented and De-Minoritized: The Racialization of Asian Americans in Higher Education.”
  • Wen Lui, ​“Complicity and Resistance: Asian American Body Politics in Black Lives Matter.” ​
  • Vinay Harpalani, "DesiCrit: Theorizing the Racial Ambiguity of South Asian Americans."
  • Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” ​