LTEN 28: Intro to Asian American Lit

& Cultural StudiesUCSD Winter 2012

Professor Amanda Solomon

Key themes of the course or… what’s the point of this class?

• unity vs diversity What is gained and lost politically, for example, by positioning the communities and cultures of these specific Asian ethnicities under the category of Asian American?

• universality of literature vs specificity of race/ethnicity/class/gender/sexuality/nationality If literature in general is seen as exploring the human condition, multi-ethnic literature asks the question of who gets to be considered as participating in that human condition?

• the cultural and the political the feedback loop or the chicken and the egg relationship: how do the political and the cultural affect the lives of individuals and communities?

Key Questionsin immigrant acts

• What is national culture? What is its purpose?• What does it mean to say that Asian immigrants

and Asian Americans are “racialized”?• Why does Prof. Lowe claim that Asian American

culture is at a distance from U.S. national culture? What is productive about that distance?

• What is the double meaning of the title of her book? How are the legal acts that govern Asian immigration related to how Asian immigrants themselves choose to act and produce culture?

Abstract vs material

• abstract (adj) – existing as thought or idea but not having physical or concrete existence

• abstract citizenship – the idea that all citizens are all equal and the same before the law despite the fact that there are actual, undeniable differences between us

• material (adj) – denoting or consisting of the physical rather than the abstract, the mind or the spiritual

• Marx’s “material conception of history” ”It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

• mind world OR world mind?

• Is the idea of the abstract citizen what really governs society? Or how is the idea of the abstract citizen determined by the undeniable differences in property and possibilities of life that individuals and groups in society experience?