English 90ae. The Art of Minor Feelings: Asian American Emotional Lives in Contemporary Literature

Instructor: Sophia Mao
Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students

In her essay collection Minor Feelings (2020), Cathy Park Hong argues that Asian Americans experience a “racialized range of emotions”—what she calls “minor feelings”—when their concerns about racial injustice are repeatedly dismissed as inconsequential. What do emotions have to do with Asian American history and identity? And how do we talk about emotions critically?

This seminar revolves around the cultural history of affect for Asian Americans in a variety of contemporary literary works by Asian Americans since the 90s including essays, short stories, novels, and genre fiction. Over the course of the semester, we will learn to understand and critically analyze affect—or feelings and emotions—in ways that are not just psychic and personal but also embodied and socially, politically, and historically specific. We will examine different affective states (e.g., anger, disgust, and detachment but also the beautiful and joyous), considering how specific affects have contributed to the stereotyping of Asian Americans both as unassimilable foreign threats (the Yellow Peril) and as idealized, upwardly mobile American citizens (model minorities). More importantly, we will explore how Asian Americans themselves have used affects to challenge and exceed the categorizations that have been laid out for them.