M. Butterfly

Cho-Cho-San. Artwork by C. Yarnall Abbott from the 1903 edition of John Luther Long's Madame Butterfly.

Michael K. Johnson

English 377: Asian Americans in Literature and Popular Culture, Spring 2004

Course description

Meets

6:00–8:30 p.m. R/Roberts 105

Syllabus

Required texts

  • Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
  • David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (Plume/Penguin edition)
  • Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture
  • John Okada, No-No Boy
  • Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660
  • Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (Ivy/Ballantine Books edition)
  • recommended websites: Giant Robot and Model Minority

Course description

This section of English 377 will focus on the representation of Asians and Asian Americans in literary and popular culture. We will examine critically the "Oriental" stereotypes often reproduced in popular culture, and we will look at the way Asian American artists and writers have created complex portrayals of people of Asian descent as a means of contesting and resisting popular stereotypes. Stereotypes erase differences between individuals and between groups of people. As we continue through the course, we will want to be attentive to the specific experiences of different groups within the Asian diaspora, especially as those experiences are articulated within the framework of the literary text.

Robert G. Lee's Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture will serve as the course's backbone (although we will also branch off from Lee's observations) both by providing a general theoretical framework for discussing the production and circulation of stereotypes and by providing detailed analyses of specific texts that we will also examine. Lee argues that what he calls the "racialized Oriental" is a "social construct" that has little to do with actual individuals of Asian descent and exists primarily as an embodiment of (white) American fears, anxieties, and desires (2). The deployment of the Oriental stereotype in popular culture can often be traced to specific historical, economic, political, and cultural tensions and moments of crisis. Lee's central argument is that Asians have been "constructed as a race of aliens" in American culture who "represent a present danger of pollution" and who are often depicted in popular culture as a "disturbing and dangerous" threat to the American nation, family, and individual (2–3).

Although we will likely often agree with Lee's interpretations, we should consider his book not as the final word but rather as the starting pointing for our own conversations about literature, film, and other cultural texts. Lee points out that "popular culture is always contested terrain" and that "culture has also been an arena where Asian Americans have contested their exclusion as Orientals, critiqued the unfulfilled promises of democracy, and mapped alternative visions of American identity" (6, 13). For most of our country's history, the rights and privileges associated with American democracy (the right to vote, the right to own property, etc.) have been exclusively enjoyed by members of one dominant racial group. In the first half of the twentieth-century, legally, culturally, politically, and socially, "Americanness" was almost exclusively associated with "whiteness." People of Asian descent were legally barred from becoming American citizens because, as a series of legal decisions firmly established, they were "not white."

As Lee rightly points out, Asians in America have always resisted those processes of exclusion. However, his primary emphasis is placed on the critical analysis of the cultural and political forces (and the way those forces shape popular texts) that have worked to exclude Asian Americans from enjoying "the promises of democracy." Literature is one area of "cultural terrain" where Asian Americans have found a place to articulate alternative or resisting images of identity. One of the ways that we will contribute to the conversation started in Orientals is to supplement Lee's focus on popular culture with our own emphasis on literary culture.

Theory and method

For those of you who have completed English 181 (Literary Analysis and Interpretation), you will find that English 377 continues to emphasize the techniques of "close reading" and formal (or aesthetic) analysis that you were introduced to in the earlier course. However, as a literature course that draws on the insights of cultural studies, we will place our literary readings in the context of a variety of cultural texts, including opera, popular song, silent film, and contemporary Hollywood cinema. In contrast to the formalist method of analysis most often practiced in literature courses (which assumes the special status of the literary text and often focuses on the analysis of a single text in isolation), cultural studies asks: what happens when we examine literature not as a separate entity but as part of a continuum of cultural texts that includes movies, television shows, etc.?

Contemporary cultural critics have started to move away from the isolated study of the products of elite culture (literature, art, etc.) and "have started paying serious attention to mass, popular, and everyday materials, usually in the context of their ideologies (dominant ideas and values)" (Leitch 26). Disinterested in aesthetic issues (which are often used to create "arbitrary distinctions" between elite and mass culture artifacts), cultural studies criticism often emphasizes "ideology critique" and involves examining "the ideas, feelings, beliefs, values, and representations embedded in, and promoted by, the artifacts and practices of a culture or a group" (Leitch 27). For example, whereas few critics would argue for the aesthetic value of Flash Gordon: Spaceship to the Unknown (1936), the film is of interest from a cultural studies perspective through its specific articulation of the Oriental stereotype (the character Ming the Merciless) within a science fiction scenario of planetary invasion. That invasion, headed by Emperor Ming, echoes contemporaneous "yellow peril" hysteria (white Americans fearing that America would be overrun by uncontrollable Asian hordes). Fortunately for the world, American hero Flash Gordon (played by blonde and buff Buster Crabbe) and American heroine Dale Arden (played by blonde and babe-a-licious Jean Rogers) hop aboard a (very cheesy-looking) rocket ship to fight back the barbarian invasion from the planet Mongo. From the perspective of cultural studies, even a low-budget (but hugely popular) sci-fi melodrama such as Flash Gordon can tell us something about ideologies of race and gender in 1930s America.

Grades, attendance, weather

Grades will be determined primarily by your performance on two short essays (5–6 pages each) and a final exam. The essays should be completed in a professional and timely manner. Late papers will lose one-half a letter grade per class period (unless you provide me with evidence of a legitimate and verifiable excuse). Each essay should have an original, specific, and significant thesis—an arguable assertion that you are making about the work being discussed. Each essay should provide textual evidence (quotations) in support of that thesis, and each essay should provide a well-developed analysis, discussion, and interpretation of that evidence. The papers that receive the highest grades will be well-argued, well-supported, and relatively free of grammatical errors.

In addition to the two essays, you will also be required to write four brief papers (500–600 words each) in response to several of the films that we will watch. Those response papers will ask you to synthesize your experience of the film with your reading of one of our secondary sources. The response papers will be due the next class period after we've screened the film. Each essay and the final exam will account for 25% of your final course grade. Such factors as your performance on the four response papers, your work on an in-class presentation, quiz performance, participation, and attendance will contribute to the final 25% of the course grade. There will be a few quizzes here and there, mostly likely in the form of a 15–20 minute written response to a general question over the reading material. If you miss a quiz because of an excused absence, you may retake that quiz. Quizzes missed because of unexcused absences cannot be made up. Excessive absences, excused or unexcused, will damage your course grade.

Even if we miss class because of snow, you are still responsible for having completed the reading assigned for that day. If weather cancellations do force us to make changes, I will post information about those changes on my website.

I will also post any information about changes on my office door. If we miss a night when a film is scheduled to be screened, we will need to try to watch that film before the next week's class period. In the event of the missed screening, I will place the film on reserve at Mantor Library, and I will ask you to watch the film on your own before the next class.

Please note that any student who needs accommodations in this course because of a disability should notify me at the beginning of the semester so that arrangements can be made.

Books on reserve at Mantor Library circulation desk

Works cited