Past Undergraduate Courses

Literatures of Return

This seminar focuses on the study of contemporary transnational Anglophone literatures written under the sign of return. “Return” is one of the oldest tropes in the literature of diaspora and migration. For some migrants, the pull of home is only matched by the impossibility of going back. For others, emigration away from home and immigration into a new country must eventually be consummated with a return journey. Return can be a search for roots, or a quest for routes in the absence of known origin. Return can be chosen, coerced, or barred. Not everyone has the right of return, and the question of who does is deeply political and historically specific. Over the course of the semester, we will read narratives of reverse migration, second-generation return, temporary return, post-conflict return, economic and labor migration, ancestral pilgrimage, deportation, and the right of return. This work will attune us to radical asymmetries and inequities in the histories, contexts, and possibilities for migration around the world. 

In addition, this course will expose students to a wide range of literary genres, including novels, memoirs, poetry, short stories, essays, photography, and short films, through which we will consider “return” as a literary and narrative form. Our readings will take us around the world, to and from cities including Dublin, Haifa, and Rome; and through nations including Ghana, Haiti, India, Ireland, Kenya, Libya, Mexico, Palestine, Syria, and the United States. We will also explore writing on the “return to normal” during the Covid pandemic and reparations for slavery and colonialism. What does the transnational, transhistorical phenomenon of return teach us about the human experience of time and space? What does that old saying – “you can never go home again” – really mean?

Asian American Literature

In her 1982 book on Asian American literature, Elaine Kim argued that Asian American writers in the first half of the 20th century saw themselves as “ambassadors of goodwill to the West.” Writers like Carlos Bulosan, Jade Snow Wong, and Dhan Gopal Mukerji took it upon themselves to translate Asia for audiences in the United States—and vice versa. Kim’s assessment was premised on the fact that these writers produced autobiographical texts and memoirs about their efforts to mediate between East and West. A number of questions follow from her assessment, and will guide our inquiry in this course: To what extent can Asian American writers of literary fiction also be understood as ambassadors? Might contemporary Asian American writers and cultural producers be considered “ambassadors of goodwill” today? What/who do Asian American writers seek to translate, and for whose benefit? What is the relationship between ambassadorship, translation, and representation? And what would happen if we could learn to read Asian American literary texts with the expectation that they specifically do not do the work of representing Asian Americans?

The World and South Asia

What does it mean to write “South Asia” in English, and what is the relationship between South Asian literature and the literature of the Anglophone World? The South Asian subcontinent includes eight or ten independent nation-states, depending on how you draw the map, which comprise nearly a quarter of the world’s population. These nations have different, historically specific relationships to the English language and literature; Nepal, for instance, unlike India and Pakistan, was never a British colony or protectorate. Taking inspiration from the Kathmandu-founded, Colombo-based journal Himal Southasian’s “Right-Side-Up-Map of South Asia”, which challenges dominant modes of visualizing the region, this introductory course invites students to reconceive South Asia and its nations through English literature, on one hand, and to reconceive the literary through engagement with South Asian cultural production, on the other. Key topics of discussion will include colonialism, anti-colonial movements, and political violence; the nation, diaspora, and the concept of the global; postcolonial language politics and English’s relationship to South Asian vernaculars; sexuality, subjectivity, and sound cultures. Reading the Asian Century.

Reading the Asian 21st Century

This seminar engages contemporary Asian Anglophone literatures in the exploration of the emergence of an economically, politically, and culturally dominant Asia in the 21st century. In the first decade of the 2000s, signs of Asian globality and growth were plentiful: from the spectacle of the Beijing Olympics, to the multiplication of Indian billionaires; from the linguistic politics of the Indian and Filipino call centers, to the dissemination of Japanese and Korean pop culture; from the oscillating rhetorics of American decline and exceptionalism, to the material consequences of the U.S.-China trade war. Is the Asian century a rhetorical provocation or an empirical description of the contemporary world—or both, or neither? How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed the terms of this debate?

This course takes up the above questions by positing “the Asian 21st century” as both a literary theme and period. In what ways does the Asian 21st century describe our current cultural and geopolitical moment? How are contemporary Asian Anglophone, Asian American, and American literatures writing the Asian century? We will read novels, short stories, nonfiction, and poetry along with relevant social and cultural theory that explores the Asian century discourse. Subtopics will include the waning of Euro-American hegemony, diasporic return to global Asia, new regional alignments after September 11th, and the contemporary itself. Course texts include literature by Aravind Adiga, Mohsin Hamid, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sonny Liew, Ling Ma, Bharati Mukherjee, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, as well as a works of journalism and literary criticism. Active participation in class discussion is expected as well as commitment to close, critical reading and honing the methods of literary research.

English Literature with an Accent

Do literary texts have accents, the way people do? How do we read the accented voices of English? This class explores voice and accent in English literature and cultural production, including podcasts, audiobooks, film, and television. Everyone has an accent, but not all accents are created equal. Some are heard as “neutral” and others as markers of difference. This has serious implications in the real world: accent discrimination costs jobs, housing applications, and asylum claims. What are the implications in the field of multiethnic literature? Students will examine ethnic American literatures alongside interdisciplinary scholarship on topics including race and voice (e.g. brown voice, white voice, “Mock Asian,” Black English), the cybernetic voices of virtual assistants like Siri, forensic listening, and call centers. Students will gain broad understanding of politics of literary voice and accent, while learning to use their own accented voices to produce close, critical readings and informed social interventions.