San José State University

AAS 001: Introduction to Asian American Studies

This course introduces students to the tenets, histories, and contradictions of Asian American experiences from an interdisciplinary perspective. Focusing on a comparative analysis rather than a siloed study of disparate ethnic communities, students learn how capitalist exploitation, war, settler colonialism, imperialism, non/citizenship, and resistance have shaped the lives of those captured within the rubric of Asian American.

AAS 177: Environmental Militarism and Racisms

This upper-division course examines the structures and impacts of U.S. environmental militarism and racism, with a particular focus on its impacts on Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities. Students will learn about concepts that highlight the dynamics of environmental militarism and racism, their histories, their lingering impacts, and how people have sought to challenge them through justice struggles. From atomic warfare, to herbicide, to burn pits, to toxic waste sites, to climate disaster, the U.S. has directly and indirectly engaged in different forms of environmental violence that have targeted and devastated Asian American and other racialized communities. Given the long transit of U.S. militarism and permanent warfare over the last few centuries in and across Asia, the Pacific, and its diasporas, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Island lands, bodies, and lives have been brutalized by the protracted environmental forms of environmental violence, both fast and slow. In these wars both here and abroad, scientific methods and quantitative reasoning have been rigorously used to track the harmful of environmental war and racism onto communities of color.

AAS 184: Ethnic Studies Theory

This course examines theories of race and racism from the perspective of critical/comparative ethnic studies and Asian American studies, with an emphasis on analysis of systems and connections across racial formations. Through key texts and emerging debates, this course will equip students will the tools to interrogate the shifting structural conditions that have differentially distributed life chances for bodies and communities marked for premature death. At the same time, we will examine modes and methods of resistance through theory and action. This course will also task students to write about and produce interdisciplinary research or creative projects – capaciously conceived – across, within, and beyond a variety of fields and objects (cultural studies, visual culture, history, ethnography, etc.)

Other courses:

AAS 120: Asian American Labor and Social Movements

AAS 132: Asian Americans and the Law

AAS 155: Asian American Cultural Studies

AAS 158: Asian American Gender and Sexualities

AAS 175: Asian American Communities

AAS 186: Southeast Asian American Experiences

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

AAS/GWS/LLS 300: Theories of Race, Gender, and Sexuality

This course examines theories of race, gender, and sexuality from the perspective of critical and comparative ethnic studies. Through key texts and emerging debates, this course will equip students will the tools to interrogate the shifting structural conditions that have differentially distributed life chances for bodies and communities marked for premature death. At the same time, we will examine modes and methods of resistance through theory and action. This course will also task students to write about and produce interdisciplinary research – capaciously conceived – across, within, and beyond a variety of fields and objects (cultural studies, visual culture, history, ethnography, etc.) In short, this course is designed to provide students with a foundation to critically engage with and write about the complex imbrications of race, gender, and sexuality with specific reference to thinkers that circulate in critical and comparative ethnic studies. 

University of California, Santa Cruz

HISC 106: U.S. Horror Film: Race, Capitalism, and Monsters

In Capital, Karl Marx uses the figure of a familiar monster in order to illustrate the centrality of death in a capitalist system: “capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Centuries later, filmmaker Wes Craven observes cultural uses of horror and its sociohistorical contexts, where filmgoers spectate stories of gore, the unknown, and sinister “to have the terror of real life marshaled into some sort of order, so it can be dealt with.” Following from these thinkers who deploy monstrous, supernatural, and otherwise unsettling figures to allegorize and critique the conditions of social reproduction under capitalist modernity, this course will analyze films and images to consider how the genre of horror has screened the problems, expectations, and fantasized afterlives of racism, labor exploitation, ruin, and war in the U.S. context.

HISC 117: Making the Refugee Century

This interdisciplinary course examines the cultural discourse and systems of knowledge that have created the refugee century and the responses to it. Through historical texts, social theory, images, fiction, and film, this course asks how the refugee is embedded in a larger system of imperialism, geopolitics, and racial capitalism in order to understand how the refugee represents the normative order of our contemporary world rather than its aberration. In doing so, this course challenges constructions of “good” and “bad” refugees in need of saving and ways that refugees complicated questions about the (non)politics of human rights discourse and the complicity of the U.S. nation-state in ongoing crises of humanitarian and racialized violence.  

Other courses:

HAVC 80: Colonial Histories and Legacies: Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

CRES 100: Comparative Theories of Race and Ethnicity

HAVC 43: History of Modern Architecture

University of California, Los Angeles

Other courses:

AAS 50: Asian American Women

AAS M116: Asian American Social Movements

AAS 20: Asian American Communities