15 courses with the subject ASAM, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
ASAM 001First-Year Seminar: Chinatowns: Then & Now1
Cross-listed as HIST 001N Chinatowns have long been a fixture of urban life, serving as a haven for workers fleeing anti-Asian violence, a home for immigrant families, and a hub for tourism. This course will focus on the histories and contemporary conditions of Chinatowns in major U.S. cities, though we will also discuss the development of suburban Chinatowns and Chinatowns around the world. We will explore questions including: what spurred the development of Chinatowns? What purpose do they continue to serve, and for whom? What has been their role in Asian American, American, and urban history? Social Sciences. Writing course. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA. Spring 2027. Truong.
(Cross-listed as DANC 003 , MUSI 002C ) In this course we will examine the origins of Taiko drumming in Japan and consider how the tradition has developed in North America over the past four decades. We will discuss the role of Taiko drumming in the Asian American Movement, explore different styles of contemporary Taiko in Asian America, and gain basic drumming competency. Through the integration of academic and performance study we will consider and experience Taiko drumming as a prominent and dynamic Asian American performing art. Open to all students without prerequisite. No prior performance or musical background is required. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA, ESCH.
This course provides an introduction to the history and experiences of Asian & Pacific Islander people in the Americas, broadly conceived. It will explore the diverse range of experiences that fall under the “AAPI” rubric, including developing frameworks for understanding processes of racialization. We will explore some of the major debates in Asian American studies, including how it is positioned within (and sometimes against) other ethnic studies approaches. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed with MUSI 002A ) This course examines Asian American history and life through music that Asian Americans listen to and create. Organized thematically, we will examine how Asian Americans use music to build community, entertain themselves, pass on heritage traditions, earn social capital, make a living, respond to discrimination, fight U.S. imperialism, and create new identities. The course covers music from the late 19th century to today, and all genres from traditional Asian traditions and Western classical to K-Pop and hip hop. The course culminates in a student-curated digital exhibit. 1 credit. Fall 2026. Ouyang.
(Cross-listed as HIST 010 ) This course explores how “Asian America” came to be. We will begin with the historical experiences of Asians in the U.S., examine the origins of the term “Asian American” in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and consider its current contested usage as a demographic category. Social Sciences. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA. Fall 2026. Truong.
ASAM 011Advancing Inclusive Histories: Creating a K-12 Asian American Studies Curriculum.1
(Cross-listed as EDUC 011) In light of persistent anti-Asian racism, organizers across the US have pushed for state legislation to teach Asian American history in public schools and have achieved some levels of success. In 2022, Connecticut mandated the teaching of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history in grades K-12. In this course, we will collaborate with Connecticut-based organizers who are drafting a model AAPI history curriculum for the state education department, and we will explore the politics of public schooling and curriculum design, including whose histories are taught, and how. All students are welcome to participate in the work of creating curricula that advances more inclusive and accurate histories, and combats harmful stereotypes. No previous coursework or experience needed. 1 credit.
ASAM 034BGender, Race, and Family: Experiences of Asian Americans1
(Cross-listed with SOCI 034B ) This course explores Asian American experiences related to gender, race, and family. In the first unit, we will explore the history of Asian Americans, identifying key concepts and discussions that shape Asian American Studies. In the second unit, we will discuss a wide range of contemporary topics regarding Asian Americans, such as racial and ethnic identities, interracial and interethnic dating and marriage, parenting styles and education, anti-Asian racism, the “model minority” myth, and the “bamboo ceiling.” The course materials draw from various disciplines, including social sciences and humanities, as well as contemporary journalism, documentaries, videos, podcasts, and novels. 1 credit.
(Cross-listed as EDUC 046 , SOAN 040M ) This course examines race, nation- and empire-building projects. Drawing on the rubrics of anthropology, history, and cultural studies, we explore processes of subject formation, especially as it articulates with ideas about race and un/belonging. Because these topics are of course not limited to the sphere of education, readings will encompass broader themes outside of education. We will, however, focus on how educational processes shape the material, psychological, economic, social, and political aspects of people’s lives, and how these contend within a changing global landscape. This course explores the different ways in which education figures into nation- and empire-building projects. These include schools as institutions that create internalized colonized mindsets; intelligence as a discourse for rationalizing scientific racism; and institutions of higher education as products of imperialism and its role in the new imperialism of neoliberalism.
EDUC 014 or permission of instructor. Eligible for BLST, ASAM Catalog chapter: Asian American Studies Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/asian-american-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ASAM 047AAsian American Literature and Culture1
(Cross-listed as ENGL 047A ) Asians resurface in U.S. national culture from time to time, remembered anew amid perennial forgetting. To what extent does this (in)visibility betray a constitutive role in history? Through literary and cultural texts as well as ethnic historiography and criticism, this course charts the shifting place of Asians in modern America-as activists, transnational holders of capital, immigrants, family members, coolies, migrant laborers, colonized “nationals,” “internees,” refugees, diasporic/hybrid/futuristic subjects of color, alien suspects, and artists-by examining im/migration, empire’s wars, and the interracial future/diaspora. In providing a critical history of Asian America, this course expands the foundational concerns of Asian American studies as a field toward a transpacific and continental Asia/America while exploring minor adoptions of and resistances to Western politics, economics, and aesthetics. Readings may include Crazy Rich Asians , The Year of the Dragon , Philippine-American War political cartoons, America is in the Heart , Obasan , Dictee , Night Sky with Exit Wounds , Tropic of Orange , Homeland Elegies , The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On , Everything Everywhere All at Once , Immigrant Acts , Compositional Subjects , Coolies and Cane , Impossible Subjects , The Oriental Obscene , Partly Colored , Alien Capital , and Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation . This course may be combined with another in the 47 series into an Honors Preparation course (pending instructor approval) . 20th/21st c.
At least one W course. Recommended before or while taking the course: HIST 05B or HIST 010. Humanities. 1 credit. Eligible for ASIA, GLBL-paired. Catalog chapter: Asian American Studies Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/asian-american-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ASAM 047BAsian American War Literature1
(Cross-listed with ENGL 047B ) Asian Americans are typically studied in terms of immigration, empire, and race. America’s long history of wars in Asia and the workings of racialization within the nation as social war intimate another story. A major pathway for Asians to America and a hallmark of life in Asian America, war underlies the ways that Asians have been known in America. This course centers war in Asian American studies to (re)discover the histories that remain buried so long as only the manifestations, but not the condition, of Asian American identity and of U.S. nationhood are tackled. Examining Asian/American wars in reverse chronological order-from the War on Terror to the Vietnam War to the Korean War to World War II in the Pacific to the Philippine-American War-this course excavates the layers of the “forgotten” and repetitive history of Asian/American modernity through literature. In the process, we will explore the relation between history and literature, event and perspective, forgetting and repetition, and representation and (the) reality (of war). Readings may include The Reluctant Fundamentalist, The Sympathizer, Yellow Rain, DMZ Colony, The Guest, Camp Notes, But For the Lovers, Insurrecto , and The Manchurian Candidate . This course may be combined with ENGL 047A into an Honors Preparation course (pending instructor approval).
At least one W course. Recommended before taking the course: ENGL 009W or ENGL 047A. 1 credit. Eligible for GLBL-paired. Catalog chapter: Asian American Studies Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/asian-american-studies Access the class schedule to search for sections.
ASAM 047CAsian American Gender/Sexuality/Species1
(Cross-listed as ENGL 047C ) Asian Americans are typically represented as either the model minority, the immigrant whose successful assimilation serves to discipline other minorities, or the yellow peril, the eternal foreigner threatening to invade (including from within). How are these figures not only racial but also gendered and sexual, ultimately rooted in the fear that the other may not be human-and that this other will encroach upon the self, reveal the human as other? In what ways do gender, sexuality, and animality, in turn, challenge, even undermine, race? This course zeroes in on Asian/American gender/sexuality to examine the intertwined constitution and irreducible contradictions of desire, power, and identity while keeping an eye on the animal at humanity’s limits. Interrogating the social structures-e.g., patriarchy, white supremacy, Western colonialism, heteronormativity, anthropocentrism-that underpin subjective categories, the course will more broadly think about relationality itself, with everything that it entails-e.g., (in)visibility, love, violence, beauty, abjection, friendship, family, the body, consumption, pain, joy, emotionality, optimism, fantasy, and the crossing of boundaries. We will focus on American representations of Asian masculinity and femininity, Asian association in the (post)colony with appetite, and Asian reclamations of the queer/child/animal. Readings may include M. Butterfly, Warrior, The Chinaman Pacific and Frisco R. R. Co., Charlie Chan is Dead 2, The Joy Luck Club, “Happiness: A Manifesto,” The Book of Salt, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, The Surrendered, Dogeaters, Sort Of, and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.
Food, glorious food! Tikka masala, adobo, pad thai, General Tso’s-all dishes that are popular and ubiquitous in the US. But how did this come to be? And why is Asian America so often associated with food? This course explores the foodways of Asian America-that is, the cultural, social, and economic processes that shape the production and consumption of food. It also explores the gustatory delights of Asian American food, requiring students to not only create dishes that demonstrate knowledge of migration patterns and cultural contact, but also to cook dishes that taste good! Social Sciences. 1 credit. Access the class schedule to search for sections.
