Thursday (April 16, 2026 – July 23, 2026) | 14.00 – 15.30

Building 213 (HF), Room S 165, Frangenheimstr. 4

Rather than a wide ranging and chronological introduction to the field of Asian American literature, this course will focus on just two novels: Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer. Hagedorn’s novel is a tale of the discovery of a formerly uncontacted tribe in the Philippines mixed with an American film crew’s attempts to shoot a film about the Vietnam war in the country. Nguyen’s novel, meanwhile, is about a North Vietnamese spy first in South Vietnam and then, after the fall of Saigon, in America. Written at different times and in different contexts, the two texts nevertheless share a number of concerns: the history of American intervention in South East Asia, Hollywood’s filmic representations of these interventions, and the negotiation of complex constellations of otherness and belonging.

• Jessica Hagedorn. Dream Jungle. Penguin, 2004. ISBN: 978-0-14-200109-7
• Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Sympathizer. Corsair, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-4721-5136-0

Further information for students of the University of Cologne: Klips