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 19^th-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.

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