[UConn Hartford]

Instructor: Qazi Arka Rahman

While this is not an Honors course, Prof. Rahman welcomes Honors students of all majors and would be happy to offer Honors conversions for interested students.

Critical refugee studies is a multidisciplinary field of inquiry that intersects the humanities and the social sciences. It interrogates the multifaceted politics of refugees, refugee events, and refugees’ impacts. Departing from dominant understandings of refugees as simply victims, objects of rescue, problems, and crises, this course reconfigures refugees and refugeeness as fluid political subjects and important sites of knowledge production. It also centers refugees as complex historical actors, whose emergences and trajectories make visible not only processes and legacies of colonization, imperialism, war, militarism, displacement, state violence, and globalization, but also local and transnational attempts at belonging and social, political, and cultural transformations. Focusing on selected events since the second half of the twentieth century and attending to the intersections of ethnicity, race, class, gender, and sexuality this course is comparative and relational in scope.

[UConn Hartford]

Instructor: Qazi Arka Rahman

While this is not an Honors course, Prof. Rahman welcomes Honors students of all majors and would be happy to offer Honors conversions for interested students.

Prerequisites: ENGL 1007 or 1010 or 1011; open to juniors or higher.

This course examines the intersection of Asian American literature and pop culture, focusing on the representation and evolution of the superhero figure. Superheroes feature prominently in popular culture. Although superheroes have always been popular in the realm of comic books and graphic novels, the superhero feature film as a distinct genre did not always exist with the popularity that it has now. The popularity of the Marvel and DC cinematic universe has made superheroes a staple for the American cultural palate. Through the superhero trope, we shall consider several larger questions: why is it necessary to consider popular culture? How does popular culture shape the values of society? Who controls the meaning of popular culture? How can superheroes be divisive? These are some of the questions that this course will try to ponder as it investigates representation of superheroes in graphic novels, films, and American popular culture. Using a wide range of primary sources and scholarly writings, this course will try to look between the lines of the superhero narrative and comprehend the latent meanings of popular stories. We will explore how Asian American creators and characters have influenced and been influenced by the superhero genre, analyzing works across various media including literature, comics, and film. The course will critically engage with themes of identity, race, citizenship, power, and belonging, while considering the broader cultural and political contexts that shape these narratives.