Asian American Studies Syllabus

The Asian American Studies Working Group at Yale, founded in the spring of 2009, plays an active role in teaching and producing scholarship in the field. We offer the following syllabus as an introduction to the critical work of Asian American studies in engaging with histories of migration and empire that intersect with studies of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Presentations at Yale

Public-Facing Essays

Film and other media

  • Renee Tajima-Pena and Christine Choy, “Who Killed Vincent Chin”

  • Grace Lee, “American Revolutionary: The Evolution Of Grace Lee Boggs”

Asian American Violence 

  • Simeon Man, Anti-Asian Violence and US Imperialism 

  • Amerasia, Volume 28, Issue Two: Remembering Vincent Chin

  • Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and Making of the Alien in America

  • Mae Ngai, “From Colonial Subjects to Undesirable Aliens: Filipino Migration in the Invisible Empire” in Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

  • Mary Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-Of-The-Century New York City

Race and Representation

  • Anne Cheng, “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman”

  • Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism

  • Bob Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture

  • Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor

  • Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown

  • Ellen Wu, The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority 

  • Naoko Shibusawa, America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Eneomy

  • Khyati Y. Joshi, Jigna Desai, Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South

  • Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and US Interests in the Middle East since 1945

  • Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene

  • Karen Shimikawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage

Interrelationships of Institutional Racisms, Empire, and afterlives

  • Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad

  • Dean Saranillio, Unsustainable Empire: Alternative Histories of Hawai’i Statehood

  • Moon Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation

  • Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents 

  • Vijay Prashad, Karma of Brown Folk 

  • Candace Fujikane & Jonathan Y. Okamura (eds.), Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’i

  • Vivek Bald, et al. (eds), The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power

  • Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race

War as Empire

  • Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages

  • Yến Lê Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees

  • Fujitani, T. Geoffrey White, Lisa Yoneyama, eds., Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s) 

  • Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Culture and the Cold War

  • Monica Kim, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History

  • Susie Woo, Framed by War: Korean Children and Women at the Crossroads of US Empire

  • Christine Hong, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific

Solidarities

  • Judy Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era

  • Daryl Maeda, Rethinking the Asian American Movement 

  • Karen Ishizuka, To Serve the People 

  • Cherríe Moraga & Gloria E. Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called my Back

  • Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

  • Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity

  • Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left

  • Gary Okihiro, Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation

  • Nico Slate, Colored Cosmopolitanism; The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India

  • Estella Habal, San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement

  • Diane C. Fujino, Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life

  • Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities

  • Scott Kurashige, Shifting Grounds of Race: Politics and Society in Modern America

  • Grace Lee Boggs, Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century

Additional Reading: