Asian American Genres

How might reading across genres within
contemporary Asian American popular culture help
us understand "Asian American" as itself a
pan-ethnic umbrella term that contains many
"genres" of Asianness? What might seemingly
unrealistic Asian American genre fictions tell us
about real material changes to Asian identity and
culture? How is generic Asianness represented
through language versus the cinematic screen? And
finally, how do emerging Asian American artists
continue to negotiate the task of representing
Asianness in and through genre? How much is the
idea of an "authentic" Asian American identity
shaped by fictional forms?

This course explores the ostensibly generic
category that is "Asian American" through many
forms of popular culture. Examining the
construction of Asian American identity through
conventions associated with generic narratives and
tropes, literary genres (e.g. memoir, campus
novel) and visual culture (e.g. sci-fi, martial
arts) will be our primary objects of inquiry.

Maxine Hong Kingston's ground-breaking text The
Woman Warrior (1976) is a foundational example of
Asian American genre fiction. The contested
generic status of The Woman Warrior-is it a
real-life memoir or a fictional novel?-allows us
to examine the often slippery relationship between
what counts an "authentic" versus "fake" Asian.
The syllabus's more contemporary examples,
departing from the memoir and memoir-adjacent
narratives typically associated with the Asian
American canon, more contemporary examples draw
increasingly on "lowbrow" genres such as romance,
kung fu, spy fiction, and sci-fi.