Join Lingyan Yan, director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and associate professor of English, for a taste of the dynamic, creative, and empowering tradition of the global and American multiethnic women's novel, autobiography, and poetry, written by selected African, Asian American, Arab American, and Latina American women writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Selected themes include women from Zimbabwe, Africa, resisting poverty, patriarchy, and fighting for education; women from Ghana, Africa, struggling with tribal warfare, colonialism, slave trade, slavery, racism in the Jim Crow deep South, fighting for freedom and self-realization in 300 years of eight generations of the family saga in African diaspora; Chinese American women's immigration, the Mulan legend, women's "talk stories;" Korean women resisting Japanese colonial occupation during WWII, the exile from their divided homeland during the Korean War, advocacy for peace; a Syrian American girl growing up in the Midwest of Indianapolis, being very Muslim and very feminist, defying the stereotype of the hijab, visiting Saudi Arabia and Syria internationally to find her Arab American woman's identity; and three generations of Cuban and Cuban American women negotiating with socialism, capitalism, and cultural memories.
These rich and powerful women's storytelling in the international and global cultural contexts intersect between language, gender, culture, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, history, decolonization, immigration, and power.