This course examines how US literature has defined itself by rendering the so-called Orient as an object of representation. One sees the shape of this discourse in Jack London’s "yellow peril" imaginings, in Willa Cather's racial codings of villainy, or in Ezra Pound's route to Imagism through haiku and not-quite-translations of classical Chinese poetry. Such works show fondness, fear, condescension, mystification, or obsession around Asiatic forms. "The East" becomes exquisite, inscrutable. US empire-making and waves of immigration would alter and relocate the Other imagined by these writings--and, with the growth of Asian American literature, bring to light more nuanced understandings of non-Western cultures and subjectivities.
When he published the influential *Orientalism* in 1978, Edward Said largely had in mind the nineteenth-century British and French views of the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam. In more recent decades, scholars around Asian American studies have theorized specific examples of how such attitudes take shape across literary and cultural developments. We'll read and think along with these theories as they foreground a set of questions: how did Orientalist attitudes give rise to both "yellow peril" fearmongering and the "model minority" myth? How did shifting US economic and political anxieties alter the forms of Orientalism, or entangle it with other discourses of racism? Where can we find new traces of this imaginary--and what do they tell us? The writers and artists on our syllabus have found orientalized aesthetic approaches both repressive and useful for exploring ideas of authenticity, sympathy, power, gender, and the very idea of a coherent "Asian American" subject. We'll look, for instance, at how postwar fears of a dominant, mechanized Asia paved the way for present-day visions of cyborgs and experiments in "Techno-Orientalist" film and fiction. In our last few weeks, we will consider how "War on Terror" media and popular memoir fortified old Orientalist tropes and gave rise to new and unexpected ones.
Readings will include short fiction by Jack London, Willa Cather, Ted Chiang, and Charles Yu; poetry by Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Timothy Yu, Larissa Lai, and Fatimah Asghar; and novels by Julie Otsuka and Azar Nafisi.