Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines the contemporary construction and maintenance of race and ethnicity, through movies, music, and the Internet. Provides grounding in scholarship on media, race, ethnicity, and identity. Explores the historical role of entertainment in racialization. Investigates contemporary issues and forms of media and race. Students who have taken CMNS 486 with subtitle "Race and the Media" cannot take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

“Asian Canadian” as a term has been discursively constituted through, on the one hand, the geopolitical imaginings that have shaped and justified the policies and programs of Western imperialism (Said 1993), Cold War politics (Yoneyama 2016), national population management programs (Adachi 1978); and, on the other hand, and the mobilization of immigrant communities demanding recognition of their rights (Miki 2004). In Canada, over the last 40 years, the term Asian Canadian has also been shaped by the depoliticizing discourses of multiculturalism, neoliberalism, new forms of exclusionary nationalism and shifting imperial centres coupled with the increasing cross-border transnational flows of bodies, commodities and information. This seminar examines the critical roots of “Asian Canadian” as a term and a political identity. While recognizing the racialized construction of Asian can’t be understood in isolation outside of imperial and racial regimes, throughout, we turn to the work of critical Asian / Canadian / North American scholars who have made interventions in the reified discursive constitution of Asian Canadians whether as “the Yellow Peril”, model minorities, exoticized others or figures of disease and fear.

Critical of race-based and nationalist ethnic identities, for literary scholar and activist Roy Miki (1998), the term “Asian Canadian” designates a ‘practice’ rather than a static ethnic identity that serves the dominant regime of knowledge. It involves deterritorialization, resists assimilation, challenges aesthetic norms and homogenizing political systems, while remaining open-ended and flexible. In this course we will consider Asian Canadian grassroots activism and art practices in the 1970s; the national redress and cultural politics movements of the 1980s and 1990s; and the late-1990s onwards when the centrality normative white nation began to give way to transnationalism with new diasporas, queer and “mixed race” voices as well as growing efforts to create alliances with Indigenous and Black movements.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

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