Globalizing Asian-Pacific Identities
Course Overview
Course Overview
Growing up with fb, cinema, youtube, and more, you may have felt that you had the globe at your fingertips. Yet have you interrogated effects of this feeling on your ability to act as an independent, adaptable thinker and doer? Is it possible that media have taught you to act as a spectator, only, rather than as a curious, possibly courageous, world citizen when you study abroad, travel, consider migrant issues, or seek employment? This module explores integrity, openness and maybe expressivity, through one strand of identity, Asian-Pacificness. However, certain lessons may transfer to strands such as gender/sex, age, faith, and able-ism. A thought-provocation is sociologist Paul Gilroy’s insight that in a diasporic world, roots may matter less than commerce-impelled routes of transmission.
Philosopher Anthony Appiah argues that ‘we make ourselves up’ within discernible limits: each of us uses a ‘tool kit made available by our culture and society’. Tool kits in the Asia-Pacific area have been so deeply globalized, for so long, that we often hear concern about heritage and loss. Are we as alert, though, to visualization? The question arises with a phenotypical dimension when art historian Kobena Mercer remarks the intersection of traffic in human beings -- slavery -- and primacy in Western thought, since the Renaissance, of evidence that humans access optically.
To weave these inputs into a start-point, consider a cinema scholar’s advice about human beings’ sight. `Although we cannot control what happens to a perception before we become aware of it’, Kaja Silverman counsels, ‘we can retroactively revise the value which it assumes for us at a conscious level. We can look at an object’ (or, in USE2209, a person or people) ‘a second time, through different representational parameters, and painstakingly reverse the processes through which we have arrogated to ourselves what does not belong to us, or displaced onto another what we do not want to recognize in ourselves’. Silverman does not speak of integrity or openness. But she does consider re-looking ‘a necessary step in the coming of a subject to an ethical or a non-violent relation to the other’. You may like to look or re-look at the Georgette Chen image on this page, therefore, to ask, is this visual depiction local or globalised?
Citations for quoted passages can be found in the ‘Syllabus’ tab.
Syllabus
Syllabus
Assigned materials are cited more fully on the “Readings” page.
15 January: Prepare for class by watching some of the videos listed below. By 11:59 p.m. on 14 January -- thus, before class meets -- post on IVLE reactions of 200-400 words to any two of these videos. You choose which two you will discuss from these options:
Yellow Rage performing “listen,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba9rKhVAz80
"Cause I'm Asian," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eodwbqrs88
Chinese dance troupe, www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2fZ7lRArNM
“RIP Rich D,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1BgMwyZhtU
Be alert to tactics, gestures, or intensities that speak to what you understand of Asianness and/or Pacificness.
*Prepare for Friday’s class by reading an introduction to our module’s first strand of inquiry, a fixity of history: Salkey, “Middle Passage Anancy.” Prepare for future classes by reading the material listed by that class-meeting’s date. If you post thoughts by midnight of the Monday or Thursday, I will try to read your remarks, questions, or suggestions before we meet to explore.
18 January: what do we mean by “globalizing identity”? Which sorts of identities will we consider globalized? What ethical and/or perspectival issues are raised by ‘sampling’ as this word has come into use through hip hop? Can ‘sampling’ affect one’s identity? Which sorts of analytical approaches do we bring to this discussion, and which approaches can we investigate in search of advances? Sociologist Paul Gilroy provides some foundational insights.
By 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, post a visualized text that you will analyze
for the ‘visual’ assignment. Justify your choice in 200 words, max. Then,
reply to a classmate’s post. IT IS EVERY STUDENT’S RESPONSIBILITY TO
ENSURE THAT EACH POST RECEIVES AT LEAST ONE REPLY-POST.
22 January: discuss Smedley, “’Race’ and the Construction of Human Identity,” American Anthropologist (1998) and https://www.straitstimes.com/world/africa/chinese-man-to-be-deported-from-kenya-after-being-caught-on-video-making-racist.
Smedley’s article is US-centric. With much ‘race’ analysis emanating though from the US, UK and Europe, you should test her claims against Asian-Pacific realities, as you experience them, with attention to postcolonial issues if your focus is a place that was colonized or a colonizer (categories that may bear investigation …)
25 January: discuss half of an essay by Russell, “Playing with Race/Authenticating Alterity” (until the paragraph on p. 62 that concludes: “… the American shore”) and this report from Korea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGjGDfIg62w
A guideline is fixity vs. fluidity. Consider too the role that perception, as opposed to factual verity, can play in our work.
If you like to submit a rough draft of your ‘visual’ project, give me a hard-copy
by 25 January at 4:59 p.m. You will find assignment descriptions ahead.
29 January: discuss Tate, “Nigs R Us, or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects,” Everything But the Burden (2003) plus Malkani, excerpt from Londonstani (2006)
‘Oral history’ project due 30 January at 4:59 p.m. Hard-copy only, at my office. Early submission is fine. I penalize late submissions, barring an MC. This project is worth 25% of your final grade.
1 February: discuss excerpts from Glissant’s thoughts on relational identity. Be ready for a quiz on his proposals. I will post a few excerpts on IVLE. But here’s a sample: whereas ‘[r]oot identity … rooted the thought of self and of territory and set in motion the thought of the other and of voyage’, relation identity ‘is produced by the chaotic network of Relation and not in the hidden violence of filiation’.
5 February: no class meeting, CNY (friendly tip: start reading Dvorak; it’s a long chapter)
8 February: discuss Prashad, “Bruce Lee and the Anti-Imperialism of Kung Fu” (2003). What was flexible? What was fixed? How about, what felt flexible or fixed?
12 February: discuss Dvorak, “Chasing the Chieftain’s Daughter” (Ph.D. dissertation, 2007)
15 February: El-Haj, “The Genetic Reinscription of Race,” Annual Review of Anthropology (2006)
19 February: Solis, “The Black Pacific: Music and Racialization in Papua New Guinea and Australia,” Critical Sociology (2015)
22 February: no reading homework, probably
‘Visual’ project due 22 February at 4:59 p.m. Hard-copy only, at my office. Early submission is fine. I penalize late submissions, barring an MC. This project is worth 20% of your final grade.
5 March: Johnson, excerpt from Appropriating Blackness (2004), 178-189. This book is in CL.
8 March to 5 April: stints + two classes reserved for my use
This part of the module cannot be planned securely until we know enrollment. If enrollment permits, some stints may be solo or duo. If time permits, we can study additional material or see a film during these weeks. Or, we may see cause to devote one or more class-meetings to plan a film night for our module or for the USP, as a whole, or to organize a field trip, if the right sort of opportunity is available.
16 April: Lo, perhaps. Let’s see how things go.
19 April is Good Friday
You-choose assignment due 20 April at 4:59 p.m. Same hand-in rules, but a stiffer penalty for late submissions. I will debit 1 point for each 20 minutes. Plan ahead: I will not accept electronic submissions but early submissions are fine.