This course is a small, faculty-led seminar on the practice and discipline of literary analysis. It is meant for all students who seek an introductory literature course and would like to improve their ability to read and write critically, including those who may wish to major in English. Focusing on the close study of a few works, rather than a survey of many, the seminar will help students develop college-level skills for interpreting literature, while gaining awareness of different strategies and approaches for making sense of literary language, genres, forms, and contexts. The seminar also will develop students’ ability to write about literature and to communicate meaningfully the stakes of their analysis to an audience.

This introductory course reads a range of Asian American cultural texts that foreground mutual aid as both a panethnic and intra-ethnic tool of organizing and resistance, across multiple waves of immigration in the U.S. and in the Bay Area more specifically. The first prong of the course focuses on historical and legislative events, including the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, the annexation of the Philippines and Hawai’i by the U.S. in 1898, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and the 1980 Refugee Act. Our primary texts span an array of genres, including a novel (Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men), an autobiography (Dhan Gopal Mukerjee's Caste and Outcaste), a documentary (S. Leo Chiang's A Village Called Versailles), a graphic novel (Thi Bui's The Best We Could Do), and a stage play (Kristina Wong's Sweatshop Overlord). This first prong of the course invites students to think about the relationship between form and medium, and to understand key arguments in historical and ongoing scholarly debates about what constitutes “Asian America." The second prong of this course focuses on the forms of mutual aid, direct action and organizing that allowed these communities to survive various sets of threat and oppression. From the early family-based Benevolent Associations that aided Chinese laborers during the Exclusion era, to informal cooperatives started by Vietnamese refugees, to Hawai’ian transnational indigenous alliances, to a massive network of Asian American “aunties” that delivered homemade masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, this part of the course asks students to theorize various modes of mutual assistance and community networks. The final assessment for the course will include an ethnographic interview and report on a particular aid group or organization in the Bay Area.

This course fulfills the Literatures in English major requirement
https://english.berkeley.edu/major-requirement:


Instructor: Amanda J Su
https://english.berkeley.edu/people/amanda-jennifer-su

Requisites

• Students with 1-6 Terms in Attendance

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills