AAPI/ENG 115A — The Asian American Memoir
[ deis-us ]The recent flourishing of the memoir genre in Asian American literature coincides with the increased visibility and participation of Asian Americans in U.S. culture and politics. This course examines how the memoir has found primacy as a literary genre for articulating Asian American political subjects over a century. We will query what it means to craft selfhood as a racial minority—complicated by class, gender and sexual identities—while navigating the gaps between private memories and national history. We will learn about flashpoints in the turbulent history of migration and wars between the U.S. and various Asian countries over the twentieth century through intimate accounts of lived experiences. We will study how various authors manage the intractable issue of unreliability in memory work while responding to the pressure of speaking for their communities. Above all, we will appreciate how, by articulating themselves, each author also theorizes America and their fraught relationship to it. Usually offered every third year.