Asian American Perils: Virus, Vermin, Machine

This course works through Asian American writings, criticism, ethnography, and cultural production, to explore the persistent identification of Asian American people with nonhuman, disembodied, and dangerous entities. It explores both how Asian American racialization has developed in tandem with figures of contagion, animality, and machinery that undergird and pre-figure the explosion of Covid-era anti-Asian hate crimes; and also how Asian American and other thinkers, ethnographers, and artists chart spaces outside of conventional human-ness through reappropriation of non-human and dehumanizing tropes.