Surveys the artistic practices and innovations of Asian American novelists, poets, and filmmakers. Through literary and cultural studies, history, and historiography, we will explore the ways that Asian Americans have worked within and against genres of sentimental fiction, realism, postmodernism, memoir, and the graphic novel. Our starting point is Lisa Lowe�s assertion in Immigrant Acts that Asian American culture is: a site that shifts and marks alternatives to the national terrain by occupying other spaces, imagining different narratives and critical historiographies, and enacting practices that give rise to new forms of subjectivity and new ways of questioning the government of human life by the national state. Thus, we will approach Asian American literature itself as theory, historiography, and socio-historical practice as well as art.
