American Culture 614/History 624
Asian American History: Readings in Theory and Historiography
Scott Kurashige
University of Michigan
Course Overview
Through extensive readings in Asian/Pacific American history, this course will survey scholarship dating from the origins of ethnic studies in the 1960s to the present. Our discussions will focus on the following questions: How does the study of Asian Americans challenge historians to rethink issues of race, class, and gender? Why and how did the original vision of Asian American Studies emphasize social history and community studies? What have Asian American historians learned from interdisciplinary approaches? How have literary theory and cultural studies influenced recent and current work? What is the future direction of the field?
Course readings will help prepare you to teach classes in Asian/Pacific American history from the time of early migrations to the present. Groups to be examined include Korean, Filipino, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Chinese, and Japanese Americans. Readings in theory and historiography are designed to help graduate students frame and conceptualize research projects involving Asian American history. Course materials and discussions are also relevant to students engaging fields such as U.S. history, comparative race/ethnicity, immigration, U.S./Asia relations, and Asian diasporic communities.
Required Texts
Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991)
Gary Okihiro, Columbia Guide to Asian American History (2001)
Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (1995)
Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (2005)
Catherine Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (2003)
Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (1976)
Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America (2002)
Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu (eds.), Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment (2001)
Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2001)
Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (1998)
Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (1999)
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (1997)
Coursepack
Course Requirements
1) Seminar Participation
Students should prepare notes on readings and critical questions for seminar discussion. Such preparation will ensure lively, thoughtful, and productive discussions.
2) Analytical Paper (5 pages)
Discuss the relevance of any assigned article or set of articles from the course. Address the following questions: What is the central argument of the author(s) and how does it shape theoretical approaches to the study of history? How would these approaches impact a research project you are engaged in or considering? Due in my box or office or email by 2 p.m. on Wednesday, February 15.
3) Longer Paper (15–20 pages)
Develop a topic and reading list in conjunction with the instructor for approval by February 20. You are encouraged to discuss your topic during office hours as early as possible. You are also encouraged to submit a draft of your paper for review prior to the last week of class. Due Monday, April 24. Choose one of the following 3 options:
a) Oral history. Conduct an interview of any Asian American age 40 or over. Place your subject’s life history into the context of Asian American history by drawing upon course materials and secondary sources.
b) Family history. Research your family’s history as many generations back as possible and place these experiences into the context of Asian American history. Possible research sources may include family records, archival documents, oral interviews, and/or governmental documents combined with course materials and secondary texts.
c) Historiography paper. Choose any topic of interest related to the themes or sub-themes of the course, and write a critical review of relevant works in the field.
4) Two Oral Book Reports
(15 minutes of presentation and discussion). Make selections from the supplemental reading list. Present a critical analysis of the work and a range of reviews of the work. Provide all students in the class with one useful book review.
Guidelines for Book Reports and Common Readings
Consider each work you read from the following perspectives:
1) Empirical Data: What are the author’s findings? In what ways do these empirical findings challenge scholarly consensus or force us to think about history in new ways?
2) Method: How did the author collect her sources? What methods does the author use to interpret her sources?
3) Craft: What strategies does the author use in presenting her material? How is the work structured and organized? What is the intended audience?
4) Theory: What are the guiding assumptions driving the author’s works? On what bases, does she construct her arguments?
5) Historiography: Compare and contrast the book to related works in the field. What are the author’s goals and most important contributions?
SCHEDULE OF READINGS AND DISCUSSIONS
January 9: Introductions
January 16: MLK Holiday
January 23: Immigration and Racialization
Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans
Gary Okihiro, Columbia Guide to Asian American History
Sucheng Chan, “Asian American Historiography,” Pacific Historical Review, 65 (Aug. 1996), 363–399.
Supplemental Readings:
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
Robert Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture
Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore
Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (1909)
Yamato Ichihashi, Japanese in the United States (1932)
Bruno Lasker, Filipino Immigration to the Continental United States and to Hawaii (1931)
Elmer Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (1939)
Hilary Conroy, The Japanese Frontier in Hawaii, 1868–1898 (1953)
Gunther Barth, Bitter Strength: A History of the Chinese in the United States (1964)
Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese (1969)
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted
John Higham, Strangers in the Land
John Bodnar, The Transplanted
January 30: Chinese American Women and Social History
Judy Yung, Unbound Feet
Yuji Ichioka, “A Historian By Happenstance,” Amerasia Journal, 26: 1 (2000), 32–53.
James Henretta, “Social History as Lived and Written,” American Historical Review, 84: 5 (Dec. 1979), 1293–1322
Supplemental Readings:
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensible Enemy
Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act
Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination
Jack Tchen, New York before Chinatown
Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil
Renqiu Yu, To Save China, To Save Ourselves: The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance
George Anthony Peffer, If They Don’t Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion
Huping Ling, Surviving on the Gold Mountain : A History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives
Lisa See, On Gold Mountain
Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home
Erika Lee, At America’s Gates
Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong Chiang, and the Transformation of American Orientalism
Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown
Anthony Lee, Picturing Chinatown
Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City
Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue
February 6: Japanese Americans and Transnational History
Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires
Sucheta Mazumdar, “Asian American Studies and Asian Studies: Rethinking Roots.” From Shirley Hune, et al., Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives (Washington State University Press, 1991), 29–44.
Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers: The Chinese of Mexico and Peru,” Amerasia Journal 15: 2 (1989), 91–116
Supplemental Readings:
Yuji Ichioka, The Issei
John Modell, The Economics and Politics of Racial Accommodation
Valerie Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place
Akemi Kikumura, Through Harsh Winters and Promises Kept
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei Nisei War Bride
Edna Bonacich and John Modell, The Economic Basis of Ethnic Solidarity: Small Business in the Japanese American Community
Brian Hayashi, “For the Sake of our Japanese Brethren”: Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism Among the Japanese of Los Angeles, 1895–1942
Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice
Barbara Kawakami, Japanese Immigrant Clothing in Hawaii
Gary Okihiro, Cane Fires
Frank Chuman, The Bamboo People
Bill Hosokawa, The Nisei
Naoko Shimazu, Japan, Race, and Equality
Yukiko Koshiro, Trans-pacific Racisms and the US Occupation of Japan
February 13: Filipino Americans and Colonial History
Catherine Choy, Empire of Care
Edna Bonacich, “The Site of Class”; and Peter Kwong, “Asian American Studies Needs Class Analysis.” From Gary Y. Okihiro, et al., Privileging Positions (Washington State University Press, 1995), 67–81.
Alexander Saxton, “Race and the House of Labor.” From Gary Nash and Richard Weiss, The Great Fear (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1970), 98–120.
Edward Said, “Introduction” to Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1979), 1–28.
Supplemental Readings:
Augusto Espiritu, Five Faces of Exile
Dorothy Fujita-Rony, American Workers, Colonial Power
Craig Scharlin and Lilia Villanueva, Philip Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers Movement
E. San Juan, Jr., From Exile to Diaspora
Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History
Chris Friday, Organizing Asian American Labor
Bonacich and Cheng, Labor Immigration Under Capitalism
Ron Takaki, Pau Hana
Barbara Posadas, The Filipino Americans
Yen Le Espiritu, Filipino American Lives
Fred Cordova, Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans
Patricia J. McReynolds, Almost Americans
Joe Gallura and Emily Lawsin, Filipinos in Detroit
Angel Shaw, et al., Vestiges of War
February 20: World War II, Internment, and Racial Ideology
DEADLINE TO HAVE PAPER TOPICS APPROVED
Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy
John Dower, Excerpt from War Without Mercy
Korematsu v. U.S.
Don Nakanishi, “Surviving Democracy’s ‘Mistake’: Japanese Americans and the Enduring Legacy of Executive Order 9066,” Amerasia Journal 19: 1 (1993), 7–35.
Supplemental Readings:
Brian Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy
Lane Hirabayashi, The Politics of Fieldwork: Research in an American Concentration Camp
Richard Drinnon, Keepers of Concentration Camps
Morton Grodzins, Americans Betrayed
Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy
Peter Irons, Justice at War
Harvey Gardiner, Pawns in a Triangle of Hate
Roger Daniels, Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II
Jacobus ten Broek, Prejudice, War and the Constitution
Greg Robinson, By Order of the President
Gary Okihiro, Storied Lives
Eric Muller, Free to Die for Their Country
John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory
February 22: Turn in Analytical Papers
February 27: Break
March 6: Korean American History, Gender and Marriage
Ji-Yeon Yuh, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown
Paul Spickard, “What Must I Be? Asian Americans and the Question of Multiethnic Identity,” Amerasia Journal 23: 1 (1997), 43–60.
Jennifer Ting, “Bachelor Society” from Privileging Positions
Supplemental Readings:
Mary Paik Lee, Quiet Odyssey: A Pioneer Korean Woman in America
Soo Young Chin, Doing What Had To Be Done: The Life Narrative of Dora Yum Kim
Wayne Patterson, The Ilse, First-Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawaii
Wayne Patterson, The Korean Frontier in America
Ivan Light, Immigrant Entrepreneurs
Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots.
Bong-youn Choy, Koreans in America
Claire Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City
Kyeyoung Park, The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New York City
Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri
March 13: The Asian American Movement
Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu, eds., Asian Americans: The Movement and the Moment
Mao Tse-Tung, “On Practice.” From Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. I (Foreign Languages Press, 1977), 295–309.
Russell Leong, “Lived Theory (notes on the run),” Amerasia Journal, 21: 1/2 (1995), v&8211;x.
Glenn Omatsu, “Asian American Studies and the Crisis of Practice,” Amerasia Journal, 20: 3 (1994), 119–124.
Kenyon Chan, “Rethinking the Asian American Studies Project,” Journal of Asian American Studies, 3: 1 (2000), 17–36.
Glenn Omatsu, “Defying a 1000 Pointing Fingers and Serving the Children“
Supplemental Readings:
Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity
Amy Tachiki, et al., Roots: An Asian American Reader
Toshio Welchel, From Pearl Harbor to Saigon: Japanese American Soldiers and the Vietnam War
David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, Q & A: Queer in Asian America
Russell Leong, ed., Asian American Sexualities
Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Men and Women
Teresa Williams-Leon and Cynthia Nakashima, Mixed Heritage Asian Americans
Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America
Karin Aguilar-San Juan, The State of Asian America
William Wei, The Asian American Movement
Koji Ariyoshi, From Kona to Yenan
Karl Yoneda, Ganbatte
March 20: American-Born Asians, Race and Political Identity
Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change
Helen Zia, “Detroit Blues: Because of You Motherfuckers” from Asian American Dreams
Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, “Introduction” to positions 11.1
Daniel Widener, “Perhaps the Japanese Are to Be Thanked”
Supplemental Readings:
K. Scott Wong and Sucheng Chan, Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities during the Exclusion Era
Peter Kwong, Chinatown N.Y.
David Yoo, Growing Up Nisei
Jere Takahashi, Nisei/Sansei
Eileen Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii
Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America
Caroline Chung Simpson, An Absent Presence
Lon Kurashige, Japanese American Celebration and Conflict: A History of Ethnic Identity and Festival, 1934–1990
James Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White
Lucy Cohen, The Chinese in the Post-Civil War South
Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82
Reginald Kearney, African American Views of Japan
Mark Gallichio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China
Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism
Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines
March 27: The South Asian Diaspora and Constructions of Identity
Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting
Karen Leonard, “California’s Punjabi Pioneers”
Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry, 17 (Summer 1991), 773–797.
Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity,” Diaspora, 1: 1 (Spring 1991), 24–44.
Supplemental Readings:
Sandya Shukla, India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England
Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk
Joan Jensen, Passage from India
Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices
Lavina Shankar and Rajini Srikanth, A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America
Sunaina Maira and Rajini Srikanth, Contours of the Heart: South Asian Map North America
Johanna Lessinger, From the Ganges to the Hudson: Indian Immigrants in New York City
Padma Rangaswamy, Namasté America : Indian Immigrants in an American Metropolis
Sunaina Maira, Desis in the House
Karen Leonard, Asian Indian Americans
Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos
April 3: War, Memory, and Place
Andrew X. Pham, Catfish and Mandala
Ellen Somekawa, “On the Edge: Southeast Asians in Philadelphia and the Struggle for Space.” From Eds. Wendy L. Ng, et al., Reviewing Asian America: Locating Diversity (Washington State University Press, 1995), 33–47.
Arif Dirlik, “Place-Based Imagination: Globalism and the Politics of Place”
Supplemental Readings:
Sucheng Chan, Hmong Means Free
Ines Miyares, The Hmong Refugee Experience in the United States
Lillian Faderman, I Began My Life All Over: The Hmong and American Immigrant Experience
James Freeman, Hearts of Sorrow
Adelaida Reyes, Songs of the Caged, Songs of the Free: Music and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience
Nazli Kibria, Family Tightrope
Hien Duc Do, The Vietnamese Americans
Marilyn Young, Vietnam Wars
Luoung Ung, First They Killed My Father
Nancy Joan Smith-Hefner, Khmer American: Identity and Moral Education in a Diasporic Community
Leo Suryadinata, Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians
April 10: Southeast Asian Refugees and Questions of Culture
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Lisa Lowe, “The Power of Culture”
Amy K. Stillman, “Of the People Who Love the Land”
Supplemental Readings:
Peter Kwong, Forbidden Workers
Timothy P. Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California
Leland Saito, Race and Politics
John Horton, The Politics of Diversity: Immigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey Park, California
Mary Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism
Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism
Gina Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction
Ko-lin Chin, Smuggled Chinese: Clandestine Immigration to the United States
Michel Laguerre, The Global Ethnopolis: Chinatown, Japantown, and Manilatown in American Society
Jae-Hyup Lee, Dynamics of Ethnic Identity: Three Asian American Communities in Philadelphia
Evelyn Hu DeHart, Across the Pacific: Asian Americans and Globalization
Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich, and Lucie Cheng, The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring
Elizabeth Buck, Paradise Remade
Thomas Osborne, Annexation Hawaii: Fighting American Imperialism, or Empire Can Wait
Merze Tate, The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom
Lawrence Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History
Noel Kent, Hawai’i: Islands under the Influence
Edward Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A Labor History
Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter
Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific
April 17
Final Presentations
TURN IN FINAL PAPER BY APRIL 24