This seminar seeks to provide a vital intellectual framework for educators from across the nation – especially those who do not live and/or work in urban centers – seeking to challenge their students to think critically around how questions of literary and cinematic form and genre are related to the particulars of identity, place, and migration. We intend for the seminar to provide important professional development for instructors who are seeking to ensure that their knowledge and resources reflect ongoing demographic and literary/cinematic transformations in twenty-first century America.

The seminar will provide both a rigorous interdisciplinary framework for how to consider the complex political, social, cultural and economic dynamics that define contemporary Asian America, as well as an introduction to many literary and moving image texts – both canonical and contemporary – which use narrative, story and character to illustrate them.

Through engaged discussions, site visits, artists talks, dialogues with community organizers and multi-disciplinary projects which capture the possibilities of how creativity can function in the classroom, we hope to create a dynamic, open-ended conversation for thinking about race, culture and community, which will be sustained as an online resource for others with an interest in teaching or learning more about this subject.