Courses
Asian American Digital Culture (Spring 2025)
This course explores the digital culture of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants in the United States. Students will learn how AI, digital platforms and technologies shape Asian American representations and identities. We will analyze online literary publications, blogs, podcasts, documentaries, and digital art projects to understand issues of racism, stereotypes, injustice, and inequalities Asian Americans experience in digital space. By the end of the course, students will be able to critically analyze digital content and appreciate its significance for Asian American communities.
Asian American Digital Culture (Spring 2025)
This course focuses on South Asian immigrants’ experiences in the post 9/11 United States. We will watch and analyze South Asian (Bollywood and Lollywood) films about 9/11 like Khuda Kay Lie/In the Name of God (2007), New York (2009), My Name is Khan (2010), and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013). Broadly the course explores post-colonial tropes in these films, and discusses how Brown, South Asian, and Muslim characters are racialized and conflated with extremists, terrorists, and a potential threat in the US. Major themes include trauma, identity crisis, representational injustice, Islamophobia, double-consciousness, xenophobia, rootlessness, stereotyping, and belonging.
Asian American Digital Culture (Spring 2025)
This course focuses on intersections between race and terrorism in post-9/11 American Literature. We will explore how discourse of terrorism racializes South Asian, Middle Eastern and Muslim populations in the US. We will discuss radicalism, Islamophobia, ethnocentrism, American exceptionalism, surveillance, securitization, and human rights. The readings include novels like John Updike’s Terrorist and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land, select poems from William Heyen’s anthology September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond, and Christopher Durang’s play Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. We will also consult works by Edward Said, Judith Butler and relevant readings from Critical Terrorism Studies (Jackson, Smyth & Gunning). The writing assignments will include three response papers (2 pages each), one short paper (5 pages) and one long paper (10 pages).
South Asian American Literature (Fall 2024, 2023)
This course focuses on the contemporary literature of South Asian (Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and Nepalese) diaspora in the US. We will discuss themes like immigration, racism, multiculturalism, American dream, surveillance, hate crimes, discrimination, exile, and imperialism. The literary texts will include Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake: A Novel (2004), Sanjena Sathian’s Gold Diggers (2021), Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies (2020), Abeer Hoque’s Olive Witch: A Memoir, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008), and Samrat Upadhyay’s Mad Country (select stories, 2017). The critical/theoretical readings may include works by Rajini Srikanth, Vivek Bald, Lavina Shankar, Tamara Bhalla, and Bakirathi Mani.
9/11 Film and Human Rights (Online Winter 2024, 2023)
The course focuses on the representation of human rights in films about 9/11. We will discuss how films represent human rights and who can claim rights in the wake of 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. The topics include detentions at Guantanamo Bay, torture, surveillance, drone-strikes, Islamophobia, racism and racial profiling, trauma, and securitization. Films may include In the Name of God (2007), American Sniper (2014), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), The Report (2019), and Eye in the Sky (2015). We will also read select theoretical works by Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Kanishka Chowdhury, and others. Assignments include short response papers each week and a final paper.
9/11 and American Novel (Fall 2023, 2022)
This course focuses on American fiction written in response to 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. We will discuss themes like racism, multiculturalism, American dream and exceptionalism, surveillance, securitization, hate crimes, discrimination, and vigilante violence in the post-9/11 America. The readings include novels like Amy Waldman’s The Submission, Updike’s Terrorist, and DeLillo’s Falling Man as well as theoretical/critical writings by Judith Butler, Inderpal Grewal, Giorgio Agamben, and others. The students will be expected to submit in formal expository writing: one response paper after every two weeks (6 responses in total, each 1-2 pages); a midterm paper (5-6 pages); a final paper (9-10 pages).
Surveillance, Human Rights and Visual Arts (Online Summer 2023)
“SMILE! You are on camera.” We all have come across this warning. The message is direct: your privacy is under attack! To understand contemporary surveillance culture, this course focuses on the themes of surveillance and the right to privacy as represented in visual arts. We will analyze various forms of visual arts including Robert Greenwald’s documentary Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars (2013), and paintings/images by the artists like Mahwish Chishty, Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox, James Bridle, Laura Poitras, and others. Theoretical readings will include works of some contemporary art historians and critics like Thomas Stubblefield, Roger Stahl, and Ronak K Kapadia. Assignments include participation in the discussion forum, short response papers each week and a final paper."
Pakistani-American Literature (Spring 2023, 2022)
This course focuses on the literary representation of Pakistani diaspora in the US. We will discuss themes like immigration, racism, multiculturalism, American dream, surveillance, hate crimes, discrimination, and vigilante violence. The course also reflects on the repercussions of 9/11 for the Americans of Pakistani descent. The literary texts include Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat (1993), Wajahat Ali’s The Domestic Crusaders (2005), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Shaila Abdullah, Saffron Dreams (2009), and Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish (2012). The critical/theoretical readings may include works by Cara Cilano, Sunaina Maira, Claire Chambers, and others.
9/11 Trauma in Literature and Theory (Spring 2023, 2022)
This course traces the developments in trauma literature and theory after 9/11. The course in particular focuses on the transnational as well as structural traumas triggered by 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. We will read literary narratives written by the novelists from the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan, to reflect on the unique traumas of the various subject positions including the witness, perpetrator, victim, insider/outsider, and implicated subjects.