Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Study of primarily 20th- and 21st-century literatures and cultures by diasporic or racialized authors, oftentimes highlighting longstanding legacies of migration, racialization, social justice, and aesthetic innovation. Focus may include Asian, Black, Caribbean, or South Asian literatures and expressive arts. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

Diasporic and Transnational Asian Literatures: Displacement and its Aftermaths

Migration, forced migration. Immigrant, illegal. Expatriate, refugee. In this course, we will read diasporic and transnational Asian fiction, poetry, and memoir that nuance, challenge, and contest these terms.

Cognizant of the complicated, fraught, and polysemous natures of the term “Asian diaspora,” we will read a wide range of texts from writers living in the geographical contexts of Canada, America, Britain, Malaysia, and Singapore. Whether their writers identify as mixed race, Korean, Pakistani, Hmong, Vietnamese, Chinese, Malaysian, Punjabi, or Filipinx, each text has been shaped by the legacies and forces of imperialism, racialized globalization, uneven labour mobilities, and, in many cases, war and intergenerational trauma. What are the literary aftermaths of displacement, whether forced or desired? With a special attention to craft and form, we will consider how these literary texts create our ideas of community and identity beyond the nation-state. We will begin by reading theories of diaspora and transnationalisms before turning to four collections of poetry, two novels, and a selection of creative non-fiction and memoir.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

At the end of the class, students will be able to demonstrate they know how to

• read literary works from a range of genres and identify major and minor themes and literary techniques in the works
• understand and describe the general field of diasporic literatures literatures
• define terms relevant to literature in general, and Asian diasporic literatures in particular
• use a scholarly database such as the MLA (Modern Language Association) International Bibliography to find and identify peer-reviewed secondary sources
• analyze and write an abstract of a peer-reviewed essay
• prepare a research plan, including an annotated bibliography
• write English literature research essays using two to five peer-reviewed secondary sources; as you write, combine existing information with original thought and analysis.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Required readings will not be available at the SFU bookstore. Please support your local independent or used bookstores, or purchase the texts online. Digital copies of the texts are permitted. Some of these texts are also available through the SFU WAC Bennett Library and the public library system.

Other shorter readings will be available on Canvas

If financial hardship prevents you from purchasing copies of any of the texts, please contact me in advance of the course.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: