This memo represents the request of the Department of English to have English 382 to be granted approval as a multicultural c

Request for Multicultural Standing for English 382

This memo represents the request of the Department of English to have English 382 be granted approval as a multicultural course for Fall 06 for "East Asian Crossroads in the American West." This course will be cross-listed with History 376.  Due to an oversight, apparently neither English 379, “Introduction to Ethnic and Cultural Studies” nor English 382, “Studies in Multicultural Literature in English,” were recertified under the revised guidelines for multicultural course content.  We have chosen to list this course as English 382  A) because English 382 has no pre-requisites, and B) because it best meets the course description as a “Consideration of multiculturalism as it pertains to American culture [written] in English from Africa and other non-European Societies.”  It seems the most appropriate fit for this course granted funding under the significant Title VI grant chaired by Prof. David Pong (History) and Prof. Alice Ba (Political Science) to enrich East Asian and Asian American studies across the campus.

(The Department of English is at the present undergoing significant internal curricular review and will submit a list of courses for multicultural  approval at a later date.)

ENGLISH 382, "East Asian Crossroads in the American West" fulfills all five of the criteria for a multicultural course:

1. The course content provides significant opportunity for students to

    gain a greater understanding of the cultural diversity of the people

    of the United States.

This course would consider the American west as a complicated and enduring web of global relationships shaped by the history of immigration patterns, immigration law, and culture that arose from points of contact between East Asians and Anglo Americans. Using fiction, film, and history, this course will cover three of  points of contact:

A)We will discuss the immigration of Chinese people during the Gold Rush, trace the rise of anti-Chinese violence, culminating, for example, in the mass lynching of Chinese people in Los Angeles in the 1870s, and the "roundups" of the 1880s. B) We will then consider the history and culture of Japanese immigrants, and study the internment camps in the West during World War II, using court cases, extensive film and photographs of internment, read memoirs and fiction such as “Topaz,” "Farewell to Manzanar," & Steven Okazaki's Oscar winning film, "Days of Waiting" about a white woman interned with her husband C) We will consider the pressures toward contemporary immigration, the passage, and the points of contact with prior immigrant groups, the work, housing, culture, of recent Asian Americans on the West Coast, focusing on Asian women working in the garment industry, the computer industry, and the sex trade.

2. The course content provides significant opportunity for students to

    gain a greater understanding of world cultures

This course will look at the American West as a complicated web of global relationships that arose from the contact between East Asians and Anglo Americans. Furthermore, taking a global perspective, we would also compare the precarious situation of Chinese people in California to the situation of Chinese contract and slave labor in Peru, the Caribbean, and Mexico. The materials for this course would be interdisciplinary, ranging from the first nineteenth-century works of Chinese American fiction, such as that by Sui Sin Far, histories of the relationship between Chinese immigrants and other ethnic groups, in many places "majority" groups, in the West, through readings by historians Ronald Takaki, Robert Heizer, and Tomas Almaguer.

3. The course content provides significant opportunity for students to

    gain a greater understanding of the behavior of people within the

culture(s) under study. .

We will consider the resistance on the part of Chinese people to this violence, in the first law suits for reparations, through buying arms from China, through forging relationships with local Native American tribes, through putting pressure on the government of China, through flatly refusing to be driven out. We will trace the victorious struggle for Reparations on the part of Japanese Americans.  We will also read and re-enact a series of court cases in which Japanese Americans sued the United States government for the very experience of internment.  We will read history, fiction , and the poetry written on the walls of Angel Island where Chinese immigrants were detained. We will look at photographs, cartoons, and advertisements. Students will delve into the vast amount of archival material both posted on the web, and stored at the Smithsonian Museum of American History and the Library of Congress.

 4. The course content provides significant opportunity for students to

    compare and contrast the culture(s) under study with their own.

The course will conclude with the contemporary theme “Here is There,” and through history, film, and drama, consider the current globalization of American work that is performed by East Asians in the American West—particularly the work of East Asian women in "sweat shops" in the computer, garment, and sex work industries.

 5. The course content provides significant opportunity for students to

    use their understanding of cultural differences to inform their own

    behavior and decisions to a significantly greater degree.

Turning to resources provided by the University of Delaware's noted Undergraduate Research Program, we would seek funds for some students to undertake undergraduate research theses with visits to San Francisco, Tacoma, Washington and to the interment camps.  Paper topics, research assignments, and possible field trips to the Library of Congress and the Chinese Historical Society in New York will invite the students to understand these three points of contact in terms of their own immigrant heritage.

As the University admits and seeks to retain a growing body of East Asian students, this course would contribute to efforts to bring their history into the curriculum.

CONCLUSION: To re-iterate, this course would view the American West as an active inter-racial and inter-ethnic site, rather than a locus of disconnected if parallel white/minority histories. It gives voice to African Americans, Mexicans and Californios, and East Coast and West Coast Jews reacting to the violence and discrimination against Chinese immigrants, part of an elaborate cross-racial and heterogeneous web that emerged within the "racial purity" movements in the US, and in the reactions to the Japanese internment camps.