3 cr.

9:30 - 10:45 a.m. Tuesday / Thursday

From Jackie Chan to Fu Man Chu: Love and Fear in American Culture

In the recent Emmy-nominated AMC miniseries Broken Trail (2006), two
cowboys, played by actors Robert Duvall and Thomas Haden Church,
find themselves the guardians of five young Chinese women who have
been sold into prostitution. The marketing for the miniseries
claimed that Broken Trail reinvigorated the Western, in part because
the film supposedly portrayed a more realistic picture of race in
the 1890s West. But the plot of Broken Trail, which posits the
American cowboy as the savior of vulnerable Chinese women, rewrites
key aspect of the American West—the exclusion of Chinese immigrants
in the 1880s, and the recurring fascination with and fear of
dangerous Asian bodies.	

The first half of this course will examine what became known
as “yellow peril,” one effect of exclusion laws that monitored the
entrance of Asians into the United States (Chinese, Japanese, and
Filipino) from the 1880s to 1965. In the second half of the course,
we will focus on alternate forms of managing Asian/American bodies,
histories, and interactions—ranging from the forgetting of Japanese
internment and the occupation of the Philippines; to the ways in
which the U.S. media currently manages contemporary “perils” of
Asian global markets (think of the recent attention to Chinese-
produced pet food and toys), to the romanticized narratives of
American cowboys and Chinese women in recent films like Shanghai
Noon and Broken Trail. I have organized the course with two entwined
objectives: introducing you to interdisciplinary and transnational
studies, and developing your critical thinking, analytical, and
writing skills. How do scholars in history, literature, and
anthropology approach the same topic and period differently? How
does work in gender studies and Asian American studies draw from
multiple disciplines? These questions will promote different forms
of comparative analyses. The work of our class will aim to be
interdisciplinary in study and practice; we’ll compare the ways in
which these works illuminate different perspectives on cycles of
Asian exclusion. Required texts will include samplings from
literature, literary studies, history, cultural studies,
ethnography, gender and sexuality studies, and Asian and
Asian/American studies.