AML3673 – Spring 2027 – Adhikari

This course examines Asian American literature within a broad global framework. "Asian American" is a fluid, contested category spanning South, East, and Southeast Asian lineages. Asian American emerges through migration, labor, and exclusion and assimilation, categories that shift as the historical conditions organizing them change. We track how the texts move across borders, narrating how capitalist expansion, labor migration, and geopolitical realignment reshape diaspora and belonging, and how writers respond to (and sometimes resist) the modernity that produced their displacement. We will borrow from transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism as tools and examine what each one obscures. We interrogate who gets to represent a community, who's accused of appropriating it, and what authentic voice even means when the category itself was never stable, and how individual stories get read. At the end of the semester, students will be able to trace how the Asian American texts engage with and sometimes challenge modernity while also questioning and reshaping it.