English 90al. Memory in Asian American Literature

Instructor: Janet Zong York
Day & Time: Tuesday 12-2pm
Course Website

What is the status of memory in contemporary Asian American literature? We explore how remembrance and forgetting, both individual and collective, help constitute panethnic Asian America as an imagined community. What conflicts of memory are inherited from legacies of war, exclusion, and migration? How does memory inform responses to present injustices and the ways people narrate the past and imagine the future? Other topics: form; affect and racialization; multimedia memory; memory as work; mourning and history; memorialization and monuments. Novels, nonfiction, theory and criticism, case histories, short stories, graphic narratives, and poetry may include works by: Cathy Park Hong, Aimee Phan, Ocean Vuong, Mira Jacob, Mohsin Hamid, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ling Ma, among others.