ENGL 53.38 Narratives of Un-belonging: Bad Asians, Queer Texts

What makes an Asian/American “bad” and what makes a text “queer”? How does one shed light and offer insight on the other? How might the “bad” and the “queer” name the refusal and failure to assimilate and align oneself with racial capital, settler colonial logics, and reproductive futurity? How might both terms require us to rethink what narratives of belonging look, feel, and sound like and in turn, become the grounds for alternative solidarities, affiliations, and intimacies across lines of minority difference? To answer these questions, we will engage with primarily contemporary Asian/American works of literature, poetry, film, performance, and art that alters, disrupts, and varies Asian/American narratives of migration, assimilation, and upward mobility. Through these works, we will address historical processes of Asian/American racial, gender, and sexual formation by way of the “bad” and the “queer,” as transformative political and aesthetic categories of inquiry that risk failing to fit in, being wrong, and not belonging.

Cross Listed Courses

WGSS 51.10

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Dist:LIT; WCult:CI

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Department-Specific Course Categories

Course Group III