This course is designed for those interested in the methodological and theoretical dimensions of transnational cultural critique. Focusing on the entanglements of the North American and Asian geohistories, it brings together two distinct disciplinary trajectories. On one hand, the interrogation of Asian studies (or area studies, more generally) as Cold War knowledge formation has generated new politico-intellectual challenges increasingly since the 1990s. On the other, transnational American studies, Canadian studies, and Asian American studies have become attentive to the ways the U.S. and Canadian national ontologies have been shaped through their racialized, sexualized, and the formal and informal colonial relationship (e.g., "settler militarism") with different locations across Asia and the Pacific Islands/Oceans. The seminar will explore both the seminal works along with relatively new monographs that have emerged out of such interdisciplinary and transnational conversations. Our primary focus will be on the question of knowledge production. We will ask, for example, in what ways transpacific perspectives can be effective in illuminating the existing problems of knowledge production about Asia, the Pacific, the North America and beyond? What kind of critical thinking can be enabled by the diasporic and transpacific approaches and in what concrete ways have some scholars demonstrated its transformative quality in their own work? How might you deploy different transpacific perspectives in your projects and what are the questions you cannot ask otherwise?