Creative Imagination of Racial Justice: Asian American and Indigenous Literary and Cultural Crossings
- Course Number: ENGL 134RJ
- Prerequisites:
Check on GOLD.
- Advisory Enrollment Information:
May be repeated for credit providing letter designations are different
- Catalog Course Entry: ENGL 134AA-ZZ
- Quarter: Spring 2023
We begin this course from a recognition of incommensurability: that the Asian diasporic subject, despite racialized exclusion, acts as an ambivalent participant in settler colonial structures of power that dispossess Indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands and waters. Yet, it is also through these violent entanglements of migration, war, dispossession, and environmental degradation that Asian North American and Indigenous peoples remain connected. How do sites of Asian-Indigenous encounter bring into view settler colonialism, militarization, and U.S. imperialism? What futures can we imagine by acknowledging, reading, thinking through, and caring across these sites of non-equivalence? We will examine Asian and Indigenous literary and cultural crossings in the American Southwest, Canada, and Hawai’i, exploring how race, indigeneity, empire, conflict, and capitalist extraction shape the limits and possibilities of Asian and Indigenous coalition. By attuning our readings to Asian American/Indigenous encounters, our course will work to understand the conditions of violence alongside the radical imagination that makes possible more just futures.