TEACHING + COURSE DESCRIPTIONS (independently designed and taught)

Central to my teaching philosophy is a commitment to decolonizing knowledge production. That is, I aspire to center marginalized cultural production, histories, narratives, and intellectual genealogies. I also treat the classroom space as collaborative, where students are knowledge producers rather than only consumers. For instance, in an Asian-American literature course, we read Karen Tei Yamashita's Letters to Memory, which reflects on Yamashita's family letters as an archive of Japanese internment during WWII. For final projects, I invite students to analyze Yamashita's work but to also take inspiration from her memoir to construct their own individual or family archives, from social media documentation to family heirlooms to letters or photographs. Students then write letters reflecting on their own archives: the process of assembling, curating, and writing about an archive is both empowering and also encourages students to see themselves as knowledge producers who can see their projects as new forms of knowledge.

In both literature and writing courses that I teach, we take seriously the need to close-read and to situate the knowledges and truth-claims that we consume-- in novels, criticism, and public discourse-- in broader contexts and history. Part of my decolonial pedagogy also involves reading and thinking together across academic boundaries of knowledge-making: in an Asian-American literature course, for instance, we embed some canonical works in broader conversations about empire, migration, the larger Asian diaspora, and parts of "Asia" with histories of displacement and loss that are often not imagined as part of "Asia's" geography, such as Palestine. As an educator with experience in both literature and rhetoric and composition courses, I foreground the writing and revision process in all classes: students write preliminary drafts, have individual conferences with me on their writing's strengths, gaps, and potential new directions, undergo peer review, and submit revised work. Much of this process is designed to demystify the idea of the "perfect first draft," and to appreciate writing as an ongoing and dynamic evolution of ideas.

one of my text selections; a graphic memoir on French colonialism in Vietnam, the Vietnam War, and struggles of Vietnamese rehabilitation in the US

INTRODUCTORY ASIAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

In his 2017 latest Man Booker Prize short-listed novel, Exit West, Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid muses: “and when she went out it seemed to her that she too had migrated, that everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time.” In light of an international refugee crisis and the simultaneous increase in deportations from and immigration restrictions to the US, what does it mean for the contemporary Asian-American novel to imagine the migrant, and the “migrant through time”? How might the 20th and 21st century “Asian-American novel”—in the various ways that we may define or destabilize the category— help make visible contemporary and older debates about the displacement of bodies, immigration, and the complicated relationship between a homeland and a diaspora? This course explores Asian-American literature in a broader framework of empire, migration, displacement, and solidarity. We begin with recognizing the 1960s Black and Third World solidarities that resulted in the creation of Ethnic and Asian-American studies in the US academy. Through our readings of literature, criticism, and history, we will explore issues of race, citizenship, and gender in the project of constructing "Asian-American" identity that extend our imaginations beyond dominant understandings of "Asia." For example, our course ends with framing Palestinian-American Hala Alyan's novel Salt Houses, which reimagines trauma and displacement in Palestine as an Asian-American novel

E343: MIGRATION LITERATURES: WHERE ARE YOU "ACTUALLY" FROM?

IIn Imperial Intimacies, Hazel Carby frames "Where are you from?" as The Question perpetually asked of those who are imagined as non-belonging. Elsewhere, Shailja Patel conceptualizes the idea of "migritude" as a way of inhabiting, voicing, and celebrating migrant consciousness in the face of state-sanctioned violence, xenophobia, and colonialism. Together we will navigate fairly unchartered waters in this class by taking seriously the category of “migrant literature,” a category much less familiar, than, say, “immigration literature": how is the “migrant” imagined in global contemporary literature, and how is this imagining distinct from that of a traveler, expat, or refugee? What is the power or political utility of bringing creative works together through their investment in the “migrant”? We will begin with Patel's 2020 dynamic multi-genre text and performance, Migritude, which serves as a useful framework in exploring other global creative/critical works that grapple with issues of the displacement and movement of bodies, the making of diaspora, citizenship, and empire.

BANNED BOOKS AND NOVEL IDEAS: MAGICAL REALISM AND THE GLOBAL NOVEL

Taking as its departure point works of literature that have been "banned" or considered too dangerous by institutions, this course focuses on contemporary novels that have made their mark in global markets, and which dare to reckon with issues of race, gender, colonialism, and destabilizing notions of (white) American or British identity. Most if not all works in this course also in part take inspiration from the Latin American 1960s magical realism novel: we read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits, and Salman Rushdie'sThe Satanic Verses alongside the history of the fatwa and its controversial ban. Primarily this course is designed to prompt us to think through how the introduction of the magical or supernatural-- or imagined fantastical realities that might make more sense to us than reality-- can help throw into relief dynamics of power, exploitation, and belonging, but also how those elements make novels potentially more transgressive.

Artist Riz MC in his music video of "Englistan," which I use in class: "-stan" as an Urdu/Persian suffix means place/ country so that "Englistan" means "Land of the English"; the song through its title and content demystifies notions of England as homogenous and reminds viewers of how English identity is always already tied to colonialism and migration. Video here

1941 issue of Tropiques, a literary journal founded by Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, and René Menil in Martinique

CARIBBEAN LITERATURES: NEGRITUDE TO THE POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL

"You could stay in this place where the sun always shines and where the climate is deliciously hot and dry… since you are a tourist, the thought of what it might be like for someone who had to live day in, day out in a place that constantly suffers from drought, and so has to watch carefully every drop of fresh water used must never cross your mind”

- Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place

The Caribbean is often imagined today, as European colonizers once did, as a tropical paradise: pristine beaches, eternal sunshine, the perfect getaway. But as Kincaid insightfully observes, in such imaginings the islands are emptied out of actual Caribbean peoples, their lived experiences, and historical complexity. In this course we will read a range of major writers from various Caribbean nations and islands who write back to and dismantle such colonial fantasies of the Caribbean as they grapple with questions of race, gender, sexuality, and belonging. We will begin with Caribbean writers of the early 20th century who contributed to and advanced modernist and avant-garde literary movements that are conventionally associated with Western Europe and the US. Together we will ask: how did such texts resist colonialism and colonial ways of thinking or being? How did such texts conceptualize Caribbean regional and national belonging? What power did the Caribbean literary imagination have on transforming national consciousness? We will then explore Windrush-era and contemporary writers who negotiate the postcolonial Caribbean and nationhood. How do such texts unearth the enduring and varied legacies of slavery, indentured labor, maroonage, and the dispossession and genocide of indigenous peoples? How might literature recast those narratives of the past and imagine alternative radical futurities?

Mid-Day Meal," John Frederick Louis, Cairo, 1875

RHETORIC AND WRITING

In both Rhetoric and Composition courses I've taught, I center the writing process: how do we begin to put a draft together? How do we frame a thesis statement? As students choose an individual controversy to focus on, we begin by locating different elements of arguments in viewpoint newspaper and online articles. We go on to acquire information literacy skills and to conduct rigorous rhetorical analysis for various cultural objects-- how do we identify pathos in a meme? I conduct individual conferences for each paper that students write, design peer review, and encourage the revision process.

In my upper division "Rhetoric of 'Exotic' Food," I foreground information literacy, rhetorical analysis, and writing skills, but we focus more thoroughly on food, and rhetorics surrounding "exotic" food, as a productive site for thinking through issues of race, appropriation, colonialism, and tourism. What does it mean to consume and appreciate the cuisine of a different place, and what are the stakes involved? What histories does such consumption invoke, and what are the dangers of appreciating food as the lived realities of people are glossed over? We begin with Lisa Heldke's Exotic Appetites as a framework to guide us through debates around food cultural appropriation, and then practice rhetorical analysis on a range of cultural objects: menus, restaurant reviews, food presentation, restaurant atmospheres, and cooking shows.

BLACK LITERATURE AND THE PLANTATIONOCENE

In light of the growing national Black Lives Matter movement and resistance to state-sanctioned violence and white supremacy, how might we think about Black literatures as sites of meaning-making, healing, joy, or revolution? What is the power of the Black literary imagination in recasting narratives of the past and in envisioning radical futurities? What is the present political utility of seeking value in the speculative—“what could have been”—over the official historical record, or “what was”? This course looks at a range of contemporary Black creative works that explore the past and how the past continues to inform our present moment. Together we will ask: how do these African diasporic writers reimagine the traumatic histories of the Middle Passage and plantation slavery, and unearth moments of Black joy and resilience in rewriting those histories? How does Black literature and art negotiate issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class? Alongside creative works we will read selections of critical race theory, Black feminism, and activist agendas that will help us conceptualize Black death, the politics of resistance and refusal, and Black love.

Cover of Graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred, by Damien Duffy and John Jennings