New ASAM 197?!?

This is what Shiyuan sent us all. What do you think? Anything you'd like to change, add, omit?

ASAM 197: Asian American Activism through the Arts

Course Description:

The course is designed to provide students with the greatest opportunity to enrich themselves in Asian American studies through the course material and leadership inside the classroom. The overall success of this course rests solely on the commitment of each individual student.

Our pedagogical model is based on the experiences of learning through teaching. As such, students’ course grades will reflect feedback from their classmates and the faculty collaborator.

Through creative expression, artists work to confront, challenge, and disrupt commonly accepted forms of cultural, racial, ethnic, gender, class, sexual, and national identities. On both individual and the community level, artwork has the great potential to engage its audience in a conversation about important and often ignored social issues. Rather than thinking about art as a benign pastime, we urge you to treat the creation and consumption of artwork as a political act that can be wholly transformative on many levels.

This course is designed to encourage students towards a sustained analysis of artistic expression born from the Asian American project with a focus on the sociohistorical context in which it was produced and consumed. To do so, this course will examine the role of art in identity formation on the individual, social, and ideological levels. That is, this course will ask: In what ways has art been able to advance different social and political agendas? What types of power can art harness? And how have issues of gender and sexuality been confronted in art?

The texts for this course will include performance art, such as dance and spoken word; visual arts, such as films and documentaries; photographs; paintings; murals; and different forms of mixed media.

Lastly, we hope that this course will encourage students to support local Asian American art events with their participation and attendance as well as their boundless creativity.