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This course explores the subjectivities and spaces of the Asian diaspora in contemporary times through film and visual media. Focusing on movements such as travel, journeys, immigration, dispersion, and displacement, as well as routes and spaces like borderlands, homelands, and homes, the course examines how the transnational subjects of the immigrant, refugee, migrant worker, exile, and cosmopolitan are formed. We will consider questions such as: How do these spaces and diasporic subjects challenge the limitations, or reinforce the idea of nation-states? What forms of hybridized identities and spaces emerge within the diaspora(s)? What role does affect play in the idea of homeland? How does diaspora create possible encounters and form relationships that might not be otherwise possible? How does diaspora challenge normative constructs of race, gender, sexuality, class, the nation, Nature, the environment, and able-bodiedness/disability?
Primary texts will include Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing (1982), Lynne Sachs’s Your Day is My Night (2013), Miko Revereza’s No Data Plan (2020), Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou’s Take Out (2008), Siew Hua Yeo's A Land Imagined (2018), Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991), Debbie Lum’s Seeking Asian Female (2012), and Trinh T. Minh-Ha’s Forgetting Vietnam (2015). As part of the course, we will also conduct field research related to the Asian diaspora in Berlin, visit art exhibitions, and attend events such as the Berlin International Literature Festival and the Berlinale 2025. |
