A dream in the heart: varieties of Asian American culture

Elective Course

Like so many other immigrants to the United States, Asians – Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, etc. – were also drawn by the dream of Golden Mountain. Yet once in America, they would confront not only promise and possibility but the dream’s betrayal: hostility, rejection and exclusion. This course will explore the varieties of Asian American cultures that emerge out of the painful, disruptive struggles between expectation and reality faced by these immigrants and their children, and the representation of their experiences in the arts, media, politics and popular culture. Asian Americans are frequently stereotyped as model minorities for striving after the American dream of education, wealth and political representation. We will examine and challenge this “model minority” idea in American life and politics, especially as it relates to inter-minority conflict and cooperation, as individual American minority groups attempt to achieve their own version of American success.