Midterm Paper for AAS 1101
The midterm is due at the beginning of the class on March 18th Wednesday in both hardcopy form and on Canvas. The Midterm is worth 20% of your overall grade, so do start to
think and write early, spread out your work, make outlines, and ensure you’ve got time to
compose multiple drafts to read and revise! NO LATE ESSAYS WILL BE ACCEPTED.
Sources: The essay must engage at least 4 different course materials including the scholarly
articles and the creative ones (documentaries) we have read and watched before the due date. At
least 3 course materials have to be textual materials (scholarly articles and the novel No-No
Boy).
Formatting: (1) Essays must be written in Times New Roman size 12 font, with -inch margins,
and double-spaced. Single-space your header information, and please staple it when turning it in.
(2) Each essay is to be between 4-6 pages. Essays under 4 pages will be docked points by 1/3
of a letter grade. (3) Citations should be intext and include the author’s last name and page
number (ex. Lee, 4). (4) No cover or works-cited page necessary but please have a list of the
course articles and documentaries that you used at the end of your midterm. However, if you are
using sources outside of the course, you will need to cite properly. APA, Chicago and MLA
formats are all accepted as long as you remain consistent.
Misc.
(1) Please remember that working together with others on these essays is a breach of University
policy. It is okay to talk through specific readings with peers, but any collaboration or collusion
regarding essay questions will constitute plagiarism.
(2) I will be able to review or provide feedback on your essays ahead of time if you finish it
early. You can send it to me for review no late than 72 hours before its due date.
Essay Questions Please choose one question from the two prompts below and write an essay.
1. Discussing U.S. immigration, the American historian Thomas Dublin wrote, “I am more
struck by fundamental similarities over time—the similar motivations of immigrants and
the processes of assimilation they experienced.” Once deemed as alien incapable of
assimilating into the so-called melting-pot, Asians were denied U.S. citizenship. Worse
yet, Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans were put into concentration camps
during World War II. John Okada’s novel No-No Boy epitomizes the ruptures in Japanese
American communities after the war. Given the experiences of Asians in the U.S. before
the 1950s and various tensions represented in No-No Boy, do you think whether John
Okada would agree with Dublin’s statement? Why or why not?
2. U.S. sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant contend that race as a social
construct means that its formation is the “process by which social, economic and political
forces determine the content and importance of racial categories, and by which they are
in turn shaped by racial meanings.” In other words, “race” is a human invention and
racial hierarchies have been constructed by various forces and for different purposes.
Write an essay and discuss how U.S. immigration system constructed Asians as a race
and how it affected Asian American life
