For information about ADAAS, please visit the CCIS website: https://ccis.barnard.edu/adaas.
Asian American Studies emerged as a result of student organizing against racism and war in the late 1960s, most famously at San Francisco State College, where a campus-wide strike led to the founding of the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S. More than simply advocating a multicultural politics of visibility and inclusion, Asian American Studies opened up space for critical scholarship on the relationship between US foreign policy in Asia and waves of Asian migration, as well as on processes of racial formation, unequal citizenship, labor stratification, diasporic belonging/unbelonging, and the aesthetic practices of representation and self-representation. Asian Diaspora and Asian American Studies at Barnard offers an approach to this interdisciplinary field informed by transnational and intersectional feminism, Black, Indigenous, and critical ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and queer diasporic critique. Students are encouraged to explore histories and experiences of Asian populations in the U.S. and also to de-center the U.S. by investigating the transregional and translocal interconnections within Asia and beyond. ADAAS at Barnard encompasses Asian diasporas from West Asia (usually known by the colonial term “Middle East”) to the Pacific Islands in the context of global capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.
Program of Study
The program offers a minor. Students pursuing one of the three CCIS affiliated majors: Africana Studies, American Studies, and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, also have the opportunity to specialize in Asian Diaspora and Asian American Studies within the major. See the Catalog sections on Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies - CCIS Minors. Students interested in pursuing the minor or to incorporate it as a specialization should meet with the CCIS chair or the individual faculty director for that particular CCIS minor/specialization.
Program-level Student Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete this interdisciplinary minor will be able to demonstrate critical understanding of:
1. the genealogies and critical questions shaping the field of Asian Diaspora and Asian American Studies.
2. the historical processes of colonial modernity and racialization and how these have shaped Asian migration and diasporic and minority experiences.
3. how social difference and social power are negotiated at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, with complicated political and cultural outcomes.
4. how local, regional, and global histories and contemporary conditions interact to shape disparate experiences of migration and diaspora for heterogeneous Asian populations.
5. how theories of diaspora offer new frameworks of investigation and understanding, problematizing normative notions of national culture, authenticity, citizenship, and belonging.
6. the complex and shifting politics of self-representation and expressive cultural work for different Asian diasporic populations.
7. how to place Asian diasporic histories of racialization, inclusion, and exclusion in relation to histories of anti-Blackness, the dispossession of indigenous populations, and the experiences of other diasporic communities.
Requirements
The minor consist of five courses to be distributed as follows:
One introductory class
Two intermediate classes
Two advanced seminars