TY - JOUR
T1 - Knowledge in movement
T2 - configuring Asian American studies in Asian classrooms
AU - Lee, Hsiu chuan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Hsiu-chuan Lee. All rights reserved.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - This article takes classrooms as crucial sites to explore the critical challenges and opportunities arising from Asian American studies’ relocation to Asia. Taking a cue from Erin Manning’s theory on “the minor gesture,” I conceive classroom dialogism as operating not as much to pass on inured thoughts as to generate “minor” forces that push knowledge into movement. Specifically, I argue that the confrontations and encounters of various nationalist, culturalist and imperialist perspectives—which usually contribute to the differences and difficulties of teaching Asian American studies in Asia—may be taken less as obstructions than as “minor” activators that push for renewed knowledge structures. Section one of this article reads selected teaching accounts to not only highlight the implications of Asian classrooms’ readings of Asian American texts in the power dynamics between Asia(s) and America(s), but also excavate from students’ readings and responses the habitual models of receiving Asian American studies in Asia. Section two then turns to my experience of teaching an undergraduate Asian American literature course in Taiwan to explore classrooms’ potential to usher in the time and space needed for opening habitual thinking paradigms into movement and variation. By mobilizing in classroom switches and exchanges between thinking positions and interpretive frames, I invoked from the documentary film Voices in the Clouds (2010) the intersecting life stories of Atayal, Han Taiwanese, Asian Americans and Americans to underscore the importance to think in terms of historical change and human movements.
AB - This article takes classrooms as crucial sites to explore the critical challenges and opportunities arising from Asian American studies’ relocation to Asia. Taking a cue from Erin Manning’s theory on “the minor gesture,” I conceive classroom dialogism as operating not as much to pass on inured thoughts as to generate “minor” forces that push knowledge into movement. Specifically, I argue that the confrontations and encounters of various nationalist, culturalist and imperialist perspectives—which usually contribute to the differences and difficulties of teaching Asian American studies in Asia—may be taken less as obstructions than as “minor” activators that push for renewed knowledge structures. Section one of this article reads selected teaching accounts to not only highlight the implications of Asian classrooms’ readings of Asian American texts in the power dynamics between Asia(s) and America(s), but also excavate from students’ readings and responses the habitual models of receiving Asian American studies in Asia. Section two then turns to my experience of teaching an undergraduate Asian American literature course in Taiwan to explore classrooms’ potential to usher in the time and space needed for opening habitual thinking paradigms into movement and variation. By mobilizing in classroom switches and exchanges between thinking positions and interpretive frames, I invoked from the documentary film Voices in the Clouds (2010) the intersecting life stories of Atayal, Han Taiwanese, Asian Americans and Americans to underscore the importance to think in terms of historical change and human movements.
KW - Asian American studies in Asia
KW - Taiwan Indigenous culture
KW - Voices in the Clouds
KW - classroom dialogism
KW - the minor gesture
KW - transpacific studies
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85148038296&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1080/14649373.2023.2156120
DO - 10.1080/14649373.2023.2156120
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85148038296
SN - 1464-9373
VL - 24
SP - 72
EP - 87
JO - Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
JF - Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
IS - 1
ER -