AAST 201 - Asian American History and Society (3 cr.)
This core course is designed to introduce students to the history of Asian Americans in the United States. A course such as this should thus cover key issues central to the issues affecting Asian Americans as they enter the new millenium. Such coverage demands a historical assessment of the various groups who have immigrated to the mainland and Hawaii since the nineteenth century and fundamentally altered the face and shape of the United States. Significant areas that could guide the designing of such a course would be as follows:
- Migration and Diaspora
Global Contexts: Brief surveys of the social and political dynamics in parts of Asia that led to the migration of local populations to the mainland and Hawaii. This will help in an understanding of the international context of Asian migration as well as enable one to underscore the particular historical underpinning of various Asian diasporas.
- Immigrant Experiences
Local Contexts: This section would allow one to move from the global to the local to enable a historical understanding of the many and multiple forces that affected each group as they began life in the mainland and Hawaii. This section should help enforce the connections between the local and the global so that students understand the many ways in which colonialism, capitalism and social circumstances governed not only emigration but also immigration.
- Building America
Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Nation: This section would concentrate on the myriad ways in which the above categories crucial to an understanding of national identity in the United states was challenged, reinforced and transformed by the presence, labor and demands of Asian immigrants. This section could focus on the manner in which Asian American labor was crucial to the notion of manifest destiny governing US expansion westwards, the ideological backlash against certain groups as depicted in the "yellow peril" and similar phenomena.
- Pre-Civil Rights
The Battle for Citizenship: This section would elaborate on the previous one and concentrate on the various ways in which the law and the constitution was used by the hegemony and the minority to to their own purposes to both restrict and at times enable Asians, aliens and "orientals" in the search for their legal place as citizens in the nation. This section could be broken up into periods to reveal the ways in which certain local political, economic and social issues goverened the meaning of race, the granting of legal rights and access to citizenship.
- Post-Civil Rights
New Migrations, New Communities: This section will focus on the continuing migrations of Asian peoples to the United States, not only from Asia but from Africa, Canada, Australia etc. If one accepts that Asians, with attendant economic, social and cultural shifts, will dramatically affect the country's demographic makeup as we enter into the next millenium, this section will seek to understand the formations of new Asian American communities in an era of global capitalism and transnationalism on one hand and an increasing local backlash against affirmative action and issues pertaining to diversity on the other. It will explore among other things the manner in which new migrations and new communities both challenge and endorse the genus “Asian American.”
- Contemporary Issues