LITERATURES OF THE ASIAN DIASPORA
A FOCUS GRANT PROJECT in
Comparative Literature at Penn State
DESIGN OF THE PROJECT
The Pennsylvania State University includes more than 20 campuses, each with its own academic identity and mission. All the campuses with undergraduate programs share a common curriculum in General Education and in many majors and minors. However, given the diversity of our campuses, we represent a microcosm of several different kinds of U.S. higher education. Some of our campuses are urban, others rural; one is very large, others are medium-sized or very small; some are organized into discipline-based departments, others into interdisciplinary units; some serve student populations that are primarily “traditional” resident undergraduates, while others have a mission focused more on part-time students, two-year degrees, distance education, etc.
Our project brings together colleagues from five Penn State campuses, representing a variety of institutional characteristics, in order to educate ourselves to more fully implement the teaching of Asian and Asian-diasporic literatures within our multi-campus system, and to exemplify, for the use of faculty members elsewhere, ways in which this subject-matter can be shared while allowing for the range of different realities within which we work.
Our faculty participants represent multiple fields, from Comparative Literature and Asian studies to Spanish, English, German, Women’s Studies, and Communications (Film). We meet in person sometimes, at the University Park campus, which is the central campus geographically, the lead campus in initiating this project, and the campus with the most extensive library resources and technology facilities. In between, we communicate monthly by means such as speakerphone, teleconferencing, Pictel (interactive television), and email. Our project includes a two-day wrap-up workshop at the end of the academic year.
We have begun with theoretical issues, such as the intellectual assumptions involved in broad concepts such as world literature, globalization, ethnic studies, and diaspora. With this grounding, we are focusing on the Asian diaspora, including its long history (it is sometimes forgotten that the first human populations of the Americas came from Asia) and also the long history of Western perceptions of Asia and its peoples. We include consideration of some of the methodological questions that arise in encountering literatures with which we, or our students, may be unfamiliar, including questions about the appropriateness of translated texts and about the reading process involved. And a series of Asian diasporic texts are being read and analyzed for their contributions to the theoretical issues we are engaging, and for their value as literature.
Because one of the central challenges is to select and organize a feasible array of readings from the vast amount available, we will try three different potential structures or organizational paradigms: (1) a paradigm by diasporic region, which includes examples of Asian-heritage writing from the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia itself, where many communities are living in areas different from those of their heritage; (2) a paradigm by ethnicity interacting with religion, which uses the Muslim Turkish communities in Germany and the Netherlands as an example, and responds to the question “where, in addition to West Asia, do people of Turkish heritage live, and how does their writing reflect their Muslim and Turkish heritage?” – we may also use Muslim Chinese groups as an example; (3) a paradigm by theme and gender, which focuses on writing by women of Asian heritage and on how they perceive their situation and are perceived by others.
Any of those paradigms could serve as an organizing principle not only for our own scholarly enrichment, but also for creating new courses. Penn State’s Department of Comparative Literature plans to establish a new course called “Literatures of the Asian Diaspora,” probably using the regional model (though the work of this Focus Group might change that preferred model). However, most of us as faculty members, whether at Penn State or elsewhere, will continue to teach primarily within existing course designations. Therefore, a second route to curricular change is to enrich existing courses with new material. For example, within an existing Comparative Literature course on Asian literature (CMLIT 004), we could add a work such as Yoko Tawada’s The Bridegroom was a Dog, not only as representing Japanese literature, but also as representing the Asian diaspora. In our existing course on diversity in world literature (CMLIT 10), we might teach Tawada’s text as an example of the multilingual and ethnically diverse cultural production of contemporary Western Europe, as well as of Japan. In a course on women writers in world literature (CMLIT 406), Tawada’s work might serve to encourage the recognition of transnationalism as an aspect of women’s experience.
Potential beneficiaries of the project will be (1) ourselves and further faculty colleagues with whom we interact, as we become better informed about important works of literature and the theoretical paradigms to which they are related; (2) our students, as we will be better able to prepare them for constructive lives as members of a diverse society — and we hope that some of them will choose to pursue the study of Asia-related or diasporic subjects; (3) users of the Pennsylvania State University libraries, as one anticipated outcome will be to identify materials to add to our library collections; (4) colleagues in other institutions (see Dissemination, below), who may find our revised syllabi, website, or other possible dissemination products of interest for their own teaching, whether in small-college settings like those at which some of our participants teach, or in larger settings, like the University Park campus of Penn State; and (5) members of the public, because visitors’ presentations, films, or other events will be open to the community.
Cultural Contexts: Globalization and World Literature
Mini Conference, June 19-21, 2003
Syllabi for Teaching the Literatures of the Asian Diaspora
Other Resources: Suggested Readings
Comparative Literature at Penn State
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