AML 3673 - Fall 2026 - Adhikari

This course introduces a broad range of Asian American literary traditions. We treat Asian as a fluid and contested category, encompassing South, East, and Southeast Asian lineages, to understand Asian American as a formation mediated by migration, labor, exclusion, and assimilation. The cultural narratives we explore illuminate questions of identity in an interconnected cosmopolitan outlook. Situating the texts within the currents of global modernity, we consider how rapid technological change, capitalist expansion, and shifting geopolitical relations reconfigure experiences of diaspora and belonging. We will engage with the questions central to the field: What does it mean to belong/refuse belonging? How do language and form become sites of cultural negotiation? How do writers transmute the sediment of history, migration, and generational rupture into literature? Drawing on transnationalism, imagined communities, globalization, cosmopolitanism, diaspora studies, and multiculturalism, the course investigates representation, appropriation, appreciation, and authenticity. The close reading of the texts and our critical discussion will trace how these texts resist Orientalist representations, monolithic narratives of assimilation, and construct new imaginative possibilities for identity and community. Students will develop a shared critical vocabulary and nuanced insight into the diverse voices that define Asian American literature as both a national and transnational phenomenon.