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Asian Diaspora(s) from an Asian American Perspective
ASAMST 131 001 | CCN: 24471
TU, TH 2:00 pm - 3:29 pm Etcheverry 3107
4 Units
For centuries, people of Asian descent have settled in all parts of the World. As they migrate from their ethnic “homelands,” they have had to learn new ways of life, incorporate select cultural and social practices, and interact with diverse groups of people in their newly adopted societies. Over generations and across geographical locales, migrants have sustained their “traditional” and invented new cultural practices, religious beliefs, and social-political connections to their ethnic heritage and “homeland.” Today, these dispersed communities—or what we call diasporic Asian communities—are faced with new possibilities and challenges brought about by shifting geopolitical circumstances and new communication and media technologies. This course explores the global migration of Asians and examines the dynamic ways in which these migrants and their descendants have managed their migratory trajectories, constructed their ethnic identifications, and enacted their various affiliations with their place of settlement, ethnic homeland, and co-ethnics dispersed in other locales. Students are encouraged to think comparatively and transnationally in order to uncover the shared struggles inherent in migration as well as the inventive ways through which migrants create home, challenge practices of exclusion, and transform their places of settlement.