Global Histories of Asian American Labor

While the concept of Asian America emerged from late sixties activism, the genealogy of Asian America goes back much further to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century histories of complex labor demands and uneven immigration legislation. As the American economy experienced a fundamental shift from manufacturing and material labor to human capital and informational data, the Asian American laboring body and mind became an integral part of American culture. Spanning multiple global diasporic Asian communities (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian), this interdisciplinary course will ask how questions of race intersect with labor to influence ethnic formation. How do Asian Americans place themselves in a changing labor demographic consisting of middle-class professionals, entrepreneurs, foreign students, low-wage temp workers, asylum seekers, and guest workers? Grounded in historical moments such as the fin-de-siècle yellow peril narrative, postwar pressures of the model minority, the 1965 Immigration Act, and post-9/11 Islamic peril, we will examine texts that have both historical and literary interest--political memoirs, novels, institutional handbooks, legal documents, and photographs-to address the scope and evolution of Asian American culture. Historical readings will include Moon-Ho Jung, Gary Okihiro, Vivek Bald, and Junaid Rana; literary readings will include authors like Julie Otsuka, Viet Nguyen, and Jhumpa Lahiri.   

Historical Studies:

Gary Okhiniro, Storied Lives Japanese American Students and World War II (1999)

Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (2006)

Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims (2011)

Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (2013)

 Literary Readings:

Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (1946)

Frank Chin, The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R.R. Co (1988)

Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine (2002)

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (2013)

Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer (2015)