ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE SEMINAR SYLLABUS

BACKGROUND 

At the annual Kundiman Retreat, Kundiman Fellows have the opportunity to attend a 90-minute Asian American Literature Seminar. These seminars have typically been led by Kundiman community members who, in addition to being writers, are also thinkers, arts workers, facilitators, and scholars within the field — offering a multifaceted look at the evolution of Asian American literature. This seminar is many Fellows’ first introduction to the history and contributions of Asian American writers.

To further expand access to knowledge of the Asian American literary canon, we have developed this syllabus using resources and information from past Asian American Literature Seminars. This is a collective resource based on years of intergenerational knowledge-sharing at our Retreat. While this is not a comprehensive list, it is meant to serve as a starting point for further study. In making this syllabus publicly available, our goal is to provide a living document for future generations of writers and arts workers to learn more about literary coalitions, collectives, and history. If you would like to suggest an addition to our syllabus, please email info@kundiman.org. 

We are grateful to Margaret Rhee, Purvi Shah, Ryan Lee Wong, and Timothy Yu for their generous contributions in developing this syllabus. 

OVERVIEW 

This seminar serves as an informal introduction to Asian American literature. It considers the historic and political roots of the term “Asian American” and examines how the development of Asian American literature has run parallel to the evolution of this identity, with a selective focus on the works of 20th and 21st-century Asian American writers.

This course will explore the Asian American movement in the literary arts and the contributions of various organizations and collectives including: Asian American Arts Alliance (A4), Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW), Asian American Literature Festival Collective (AALFC), Bamboo Ridge Press, Kaya Press, Kearny Street Workshop, Kundiman, Mizna, Pacific Islanders in Publishing, Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and the South Asian Womxn’s Creative Collective (SAWCC) amongst others. It will look at the intersections of Asian American literature with Adoptee literature, Feminist literature, Indo-Carribean literature, LGBTQ+ literature, Pacific Islander literature, Transnational literature, and more.

Ultimately, this seminar considers how Asian American literature has evolved over the years to unite different communities across the broad Asian diaspora, and asks what role contemporary writers play in shaping Asian American literature.

SELECTED READINGS

• Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974), Edited by Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada and Shawn Wong

• Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982) by Elaine H. Kim 

• Creation Fire: A Cafra Anthology of Caribbean Women's Poetry (1990), Edited by Ramabai Espinet

• Blood Into Ink: South Asian And Middle Eastern Women Write War (1994), Edited by Miriam Cooke and Roshni Rustomji-Kerns

• The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s (1994), Edited by Karin Aguilar-San Juan

• Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995), Edited by Walter K. Lew 

• Growing Up Local: An Anthology of Poetry and Prose from Hawaiʻi (1998), Edited by Bill Teter, Darrell H.Y. Lum, Eric Chock, and James Harstad

• Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965 (2009) by Timothy Yu 

• I Hotel (2010) by Karen Tei Yamashita

• Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia (2021) by Timothy Yu 

• Angel Island poems

For further reading, we recommend a selection of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction titles from Kundiman Faculty members. 

GENERATIVE EXERCISES

• This prompt has been adapted from an exercise by Ryan Lee Wong during an Asian American Literature Seminar. It uses the first person plural and is based on the famous last pages of I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita: Tell a history of your family or community in the 'we,' to challenge and subvert the 'we,' to see who is and isn't included in the 'we,' to feel its strengths and weaknesses.