Ethnic Studies

This course examines the Asian diaspora in Latin America. It explores issues of immigration and cultural hybridity as related to descendants and national identity. This course discusses the intertwined relationships among power, representation, and cultural production. It engages visual culture, popular culture and film, and other media, as a means to underscore the role that cultural production has played in transforming, adapting, and sustaining normative ideas regarding ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in relation to citizenship.

This course examines Māori, Pacific and Indigenous peoples’ philosophies and relationships with land, language, culture, resources, development and political frameworks within settler-colonial states and Pacific nations and others.

This course examines policies and programs dealing with ethnic relations based on the experiences of Singapore and Malaysia. It focuses on how these much talked about and debated policies, impact or affect the Malays in particular, who constitute a numerical minority in Singapore, but form the majority in Malaysia. The course examines major socio‐historical factors conditioning these policies and programs and the processes by which they are materialized from the period of British colonialism to the present. How these efforts bear upon nation building and national integration is explored.

This course looks at the detrimental effects that research has historically had on Indigenous peoples and the relatively recent creation of research methodologies by Indigenous peoples to counteract Imperial research, and to empower and decolonize.

This course explores the history of race, ethnicity, nationalism, nation-building processes, and migration in Latin American countries. It offers a study of the influences of Asian immigrant communities on Latin American populations. This course discusses the dynamics and demographics of Asian migration to Latin American and migrants' integration processes into the education system, labor market, and social, political, and cultural life. It focuses on the responses of host societies to Asian immigrant groups such as racism, xenophobia, and other forms of exclusion.

This course examines the Caribbean, with specific attention to the historical, environmental, socio-cultural features of modern existence that have come to constitute Caribbean experience. Special attention is given to moving beyond a linguistically singular and myopic vision of the Caribbean, to one that emphasizes its complexities and contradictions through a comparative lens. While it explores the various routes of cultural formation, it also explores the social institutions that shaped the region and the processes of socialization and indigenization that took root.