Asian American Affect: The Cultural Politics of Emotion
AMST S254 (CRN: 30340)
Instructors: Minh Vu
Dates: Session B, June 30 - August 1, 2025
Course Mode: In-Person
Meeting Times: MW 9.00-12.15
Distributional Requirements: Humanities
In-person Course. This seminar examines Asian American history and culture through the lens of affect. Whether the political demands of revolutionaries and rebels in the 1970s, the broken English of stereotyped Asian immigrants on TV, or the melancholic musings of “cut fruit” diaspora poets, affect—in other words: emotion, or etymologically, the capacity to “move” or be “moved”—generates social constructs around Asian American race, gender, and sexuality. Historically, affect has worked with and through the economic, the political, and the cultural to generate categories including (but not limited to) the orient, the indebted refugee, and the model minority. By studying a range of contemporary cultural representations—across poetry, literature, film, and music—students will consider how Asian Americans reproduce and/or trouble these reductive tropes by exhibiting and embodying their own dis/affective poetics and politics. Example texts and themes include but are not limited to: Yoko Ono, Ocean Vuong, Crazy Rich Asians, Beef, Kim’s Convenience, nerds, rave culture, “sad girl music,” and YouTube personalities (nigahiga, Lilly Singh, and Wong Fu Productions). Enrollment limited to 12 students. 1 Credit. Session B: June 30 – August 1. Tuition: $5270.