Oral Presentation/Literature Review Presentation

 

The purpose of this assignment is threefold:

1)    To give you the opportunity to teach the class by speaking for a sustained period of 15 minutes

2)    To provide additional historical, cultural, or theoretical context for our main reading

3)    To introduce the class to historical, cultural, or theoretical material that may be helpful to their research papers

You will be responsible for presenting the material you choose for 10-15 minutes and for distributing a one-page handout to the class. The handout can either be a review/summary of the article/chapter you are presenting or a summation of the historical or cultural overview of immigration to the U.S. that you researched.

I would prefer for students to choose either topics or articles based on the list below, but if there is a particular topic or article that is not on this list that you would like to choose, please feel free to contact me and we can discuss alternative options.

List your top 3 presentation choices (either by novel/film or specific article) by next week.

Presentation Topics:

Week 3

W—Feb 13     America is in the Heart

 *History of Filipino immigration to the U.S.

*Role of Filipinos in California agriculture

* “Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile” – Oscar V. Campomanes from Reading the Literatures of Asian America

 

Week 4

W—Feb 20     Thousand Pieces of Gold  (film)

*History of Chinese immigration to the U.S. in the late 19^th century

*History of Chinese women in California and the West in the late 19^th century

*U.S. immigration laws during the late 19^th century

* The Coming Man: 19^th Century American Perceptions of the Chinese – Philip Choy, Lorraine Dong, Marlon Hom [book of images of Chinese in late 19^th century popular press]  (see Jennifer)

 

Week 5

W—Feb 27     China Boy

*History of Chinese immigration to the U.S. in the 20^th century

*History of Chinese during WWII

*David Eng’s introduction to Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America

 

Week 7

W—Mar 13    Picture Bride (film)

*History of immigration to Hawaii of various Asian-ethnic groups, particularly Japanese cane workers

*History of labor in the sugar planatations in Hawaii

*Any article about Hawaiian colonization, particularly from the special edition of Amerasia Journal Vol. 26, No. 2 2000 “Whose Vision: Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawaii”

* “Sense of Place, History, and the Concept of the ‘Local’ in Hawaii’s Asian/Pacific American Literature” – Stephen Sumida from Reading the Literatures of Asian America

* “Using the Past to Inform the Future: An Historiography of Hawai’i’s Asian and Pacific Islander Americans” – Eileen H. Tamura from Amerasia Journal Vol. 26, No. 1 2000

 

Week 8

W—Mar 27    Comfort Woman

*History of Korean immigration to the U.S.

*History of Koreans during WWII

*History of Korean Comfort Women during WWII

*Any chapter from Silence Broken: Korean Comfort Women by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson (see Jennifer)

*Chapter 6 from Immigrant Acts “Unfaithful to the Original: The Subject of Dictee”

 

Week 9

W—Apr 3       Regret to Inform (film)

*History of immigration of Vietnamese to the U.S.

*History of the American war in Viet Nam, particularly from the perspective of Vietnamese

*Chapter One/Introduction to Renny Christopher’s The Viet Nam War/The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives (see Jennifer)

 

Week 10

W—Apr 10     My Year of Meats  

*History of Japanese immigration to the U.S.

 

Week 11

W—Apr 17     The English Patient

*History of Indian colonization, esp. during WWII

*History of Sikhs in the diaspora

*Chapter 1 from Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism – Benedict Anderson

 

Week 12

W—Apr 24     Mississippi Masala (film)

*History of Indian immigration to the U.S.

*Articles on inter-racial relationships, particularly of Asians with non-Asians and non-Caucasians

*History of Partition of India and Pakistan

 

Week 13

W—May 1      The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee

*Any article about bi-racial identity or hapa identity

*Any article about Chinese Americans in the South or in Louisiana in particular

* “What Must I Be? Asian Americans and the Question of Multiethnic Identity” – Paul Spickard from Asian American Studies: A Reader

* “Hambun, Hambun” – Susan Ito from Making More Waves

 

Articles applicable to any topic/text:

*Chapter 4 in Immigrant Acts “Imagining Los Angeles in the Production of Multiculturalism”

*David Palumbo-Liu’s introduction to Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (see Jennifer)

* “Maiden Voyages: Excursions in Sexuality” – Dana Takagi from Making More Waves

* “Race, Class, and Gender in Asian America” – Yen Le Espirtu from Making More Waves

* “Ethnicity, Literary Theory, and the Grounds of Resistance” – Betsy Erkkila from American Quarterly, December 1995, Vol. 47, No. 4  (see Jennifer)

*Gloria Anzaldua’s introduction “Haciendo Caras, Una Entrada” from Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color

* “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia” – David Eng and ShinHee Han  (see Jennifer)

* “The Ambivalent American: Asian American Literature on the Cusp” – Shirley Geok-lin Lim from Reading the Literatures of Asian America