Course Descriptions

Daniel Boone. Davy Crockett. Nellie Bly.  Uncle Tom. Nancy Drew. Jacqueline Baker. Emma Goldman. Gloria Steinem. Hattie McDaniel. Bessie Smith. Pocahontas. Angela Davis. Bruce Lee. Lucille Ball. Tony Hawk.  What makes an American man?  What makes an American woman?  How do the answers change over time and why?

This course will emphasize the nineteenth century roots of contemporary American culture as we investigate the cultural work done by American models of how to be men and how to be women in the nation. We will ask questions about the intersections of race, class, gender, place, sexual orientation, and nation. What work do their words, images, and selves do in the larger social worlds they inhabit? What does it mean to be gendered raced, classed in this country? How do the patterns and models explored in the previous centuries feed our narratives, metaphors, and identities today?

Requirements

“Introduction to American Studies” will involve both lecture and discussion.  Students are expected to engage the day’s reading before the class meets, bring the reading materials to lecture, and be prepared to discuss them in the context of the class day.  Students in this course will be evaluated on a combination of in-class exams, research, and occasional assigned reading responses; participation and attendance are also important for the final grade in the class.

Possible Texts

E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era

Gail Collins, America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines

Additional articles and films on reserves

Partially fulfills legislative requirement in American History.

Flag(s): Cultural Diversity

AMS 310 is an introductory course in American Studies—the interdisciplinary study of American culture and society. We will begin our journey by considering some of the critical transformations—both physical and ideological—that World War II brought to American society and culture.  Filled with televisions, cars, suburbs, malls and chain stores, the landscape that we know so well today came of age during this period.  Throughout the course, we will analyze how communities, broadly defined by differing variables like age, geography, gender, race, ethnicity, class and/or political persuasion, have wrestled with questions about identity, inclusion and exclusion in modern America. While the course will proceed chronologically, I have organized these topics around three separate themes: consumerism, youth culture, and multiculturalism.                 

Requirements

First exam (in-class): 20%

Second exam (in-class): 30%

Final exam (cumulative, 3 hours long): 50 %.

In addition to the graded assignments, regular attendance is expected.

Possible Texts

Clara Marie Allen and Constance Bowman Reid, Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer in a Bomber Factory

Mary Brave Bird, Lakota Woman

Elva Treviño Hart, Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi

Partially fulfills legislative requirement in American History.

Flag(s): Cultural Diversity

The relationship between representation and “reality” has been grappled with by authors and photographers since the invention of photography in the nineteenth century. This course explores the intersection of American literature and photography from the late nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the camera as a central technology in the making of modernity. We will read novels, short stories, critical texts and will consider the work of several photographers, analyzing each artists’ ways of representing the world within the contexts of shifting social and cultural orders. We will consider several key questions:  How has photography altered our understanding of American history and culture?  How have American authors responded to photography, represented the act of image-making, or marshaled the power of photographs for their works of literature?  How does a photograph impact our understanding of a written work?  How does writing about a photograph change our perception of the image?  In an increasingly image-saturated culture, how does an artist visually and textually represent his or her reality? How is a photograph or manuscript framed by digital and institutional archives and how do these collections shape understandings of the texts?

This course places the archive—both physical and digital—at the center of our exploration of visual and textual works. Questions about the power of archives to frame understanding, to delimit self and Other, and to constitute and challenge the terms of national, regional, or social belonging will guide our inquiry. We will cover the relationship between photography, literature and several key topics in American cultural history including: the construction of identity, the family, nation and empire, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, literary genres, and cultural memory.  We will consider a broad range of sources from paintings to carte-de-visite to digital images, from novels and shorts stories about photography to critical theories of photography.  This class will be partnered with both the Harry Ransom Center and the Digital Writing and Reading Lab so that we may draw on special collections material for course content and make use of digital classrooms and online environments to construct and interpret our own collections of text and images. Because this is a writing intensive course, we will study the writing process as we practice close textual analysis and the crafting of arguments across many forms of written and visual communication.                 

Requirements

Two-Page Paper #1                       10%

Two-Page Paper #2                       10%

Blog Postings and Conferences       20%

Lead Class Discussion                    10%

Final Paper (5 pages)                     15%

Final Paper Revision (7 pages)        35%

Possible Texts

Sanora Babb, Whose Names Are Unknown

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Course Reader

Flag(s): Writing

As the 19th century drew to a close, American cities began to give birth to a vibrant new mass culture.  Much of this culture manifested itself in new entertainment venues, including amusement parks, zoos, and cinemas.  As the century wore on, these entertainment spaces increased in number and complexity, becoming a familiar part of life in America – and in many other countries as well.  In this course we will explore the history of these spaces, using them as a lens through which to explore larger currents of cultural change. 

This course will be divided into three sections.  The first will explore the early days of amusement spaces as they arose alongside mass culture in American cities.  In the second section of the course we will deal with the new age of amusements that began with the opening of Disneyland in 1955.  The final section of the course will deal with the modern era of amusement spaces, an era defined by the globalization of mass amusements. 

The locations we will be discussing in this class – amusement parks, malls, zoos, and so on – are fun places often understood as frivolous and bereft of meaning.  We will be working to peer beneath the surface of these entertaining spaces, uncovering the extremely rich cultural forces that define and drive them and coming to grips with the way they influence American culture.  We will touch on a wide range of topics, including race, class, and gender roles, shifting understandings of public and private and man and nature, the rise of globalization, and the emergence of a corporately-driven “convergence culture.”  Our ultimate goal is to come to a better understanding of the profound effect seemingly meaningless amusement spaces have on American culture.

Requirements

Attendance and Discussion      20%

Tests      20%

Response Paper      20%

Research Paper       40%

Possible Texts

Susan G. Douglas’s Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience

John F. Kasson’s Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century

Joy S. Kasson’s Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History

Kathy Peiss’s Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York

Aviad E. Raz’s Riding the Black Ship: Japan and Tokyo Disneyland

Flag(s): Writing

Throughout the twentieth century, Marxism has been cast as subversively un-American and as a threat to individuals living in America. Yet this ignores Marxism's long history in American political, social, and cultural life. Many Americans have embraced Marxism in diverse ways since the late 1800s, seeing it as a mode of political analysis and engagement, as well as a theoretical approach to history and art. In this course, students will explore these processes and examine how Americans have understood and transformed Marxism in light of their distinct experiences and political goals. In the first of three units, we will examine key writings by Karl Marx, paying close attention to key concepts later revised. In unit two, through analysis of philosophical tracts, speeches, literature, other primary documents, and secondary readings, we will investigate the ways individuals and groups have understood these ideas and sought to make them their own, processes entwined with ideologies of class, race, gender, and nation. Having thought about Marxism in this sense, in unit three we will turn our eyes towards aesthetics and think through Marxism, asking how seemingly unrelated elements of American culture such as film, literature, and drama relate to the ideas explored all semester.

Requirements

3 Reading Responses, 15%

Auto-Critique, 10%

Auto-Critique Revision, 10%

Essay 1, 20%

Essay 2, 25%

Discussion, 10%

Reading Quizzes, 10%

Possible Texts

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx, excerpts from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Karl Marx , excerpts from Capital

Tillie Olsen, Yonnondio:  From the Thirties

Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty

James Boggs, The American Revolution:  Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook

Various articles, essays, primary documents, and book excerpts to be posted on Blackboard.

Short films to be placed on Reserve

Flag(s): Writing

From cancer treatments to Roombas, the products of scientific research surround our daily lives.  Yet the work that seems to be confined to the laboratory is, and has often been, visible to the public.  The debates and controversies surrounding this research serve as springboards to learn about several American writers, philosophers, scientists, and citizens who encourage us to think critically about how science challenges how we define ourselves.  The “mechanical animal” refers to the shifting boundaries between technology, machines, and human and animal bodies that often figure prominently in the most important scientific controversies in America, and serves as our central metaphor for exploring these issues.

My aim for this course is to familiarize you with a less-trodden path of American history than you may have encountered before.  By premising this course on the place of American science within American culture, we gain a new angle of perception on how Americans view themselves, their culture, and their history.

This course provides a thorough history of the development of significant scientific debates, how they played out in the larger American culture, and how they influenced American identity in different ways.  As we will find, the terms “scientific,” “human,” and most importantly, “American” are all hotly contested terms.  As we move roughly chronologically (sometimes circuitously) from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, we will encounter a host of non-scientists, non-humans, and non-Americans whose presences are vital to understanding what’s at stake for American identity in the context of major scientific breakthroughs.

While there is certainly a lot of “science” in this course, I aim less to educate you about chemistry, biology, and engineering than about how these fields impact American culture.  Scientific discourse has played major roles in how race, gender, class, and nationalism have formed and changed shape over time, and have also deeply impacted the meaning of American citizenship in different but powerful ways.

Requirements

Participation:                                                               15%

5 Think Pieces (in toto):                                               15%                                   

3 Unit Papers (15% per paper):                                    45%

Final Revised Paper, including informal presentation:      25%

Possible Texts

Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club

Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives

Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been

Flag(s): Writing

From Natty Bumpo to the Virginian to John McClane, American myth and literature is saturated with larger-than-life heroic figures who right wrongs and fight for justice in a way that the political and legal system cannot or will not.  In the 1930’s, faced with a crippling depression and the rumbling of wars overseas, this figure evolved, in early American comic books, into the modern superhero, as embodied by such figures as Superman and Batman.  This course will examine the reasons behind, and repercussions of, the American love affair with the superhero, focusing on the 20th century, in which the genre of the superhero came to be most explicitly defined and explored.  Along the way, we will explore how and why the superhero holds such a fascination to readers and audiences, looking at various superheroes in specific contexts in order to understand what that hero embodies for a particular public. By the end of the course, students will be able to: identify what defines the superhero as a “genre”; place the superhero within the larger heroic monomyth explored by Joseph Campbell; understand the context of the (largely Jewish and immigrant) early American comic book industry in which the superhero developed; compare and contrast the use of superheroes in both “high” and “low” culture; analyze the ways in which a given superhero reflects American culture at a particular time; and think critically about superhero comic books, movies, television, and literature as texts, as commodities, and as historical artifacts                 

Requirements

Response papers (x5) - 25%

Reading quizzes (x5) - 15%

Consumer identity profile paper - 10%

Ad analysis paper - 20%

Final research paper - 30%

Possible Texts

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic

Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool

Naomi Klein, No Logo

William Leach, Land of Desire

Judith Levine, Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping

Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream

William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish!

Elizabeth Royte, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

Juliet Schor, Born to Buy

Juliann Sivulka, Soap, Sex, and Cigarettes

Susan Strasser, Waste and Want

Robert Weems, Desegregating the DollarWaste Land (film)

Flag(s): Writing

This course considers a number of peculiarly American passions, from hot-rodding, to jazz, to the space-race, in order to examine the complicated place of technology in modern culture. How does our conception of technology relate to our visions of social progress? Does technology have a gender? How has the figure of the Yankee Tinkerer continued to shape Americans' self-image? How do machines mediate social boundaries, and who has the power to shape technology? Do any of us? Technology is a major constitutive element of modernity. For some, modernity is simply the sum-total of the monumental social changes that were wrought by industrialization. This class will account for technology as a social agent, but we will also focus on the ways in which American culture resisted and shaped emerging technologies, noting that modernity was often characterized by an ambivalent attitude toward technology. This class begins by examining the place of technology in the thinking of the Enlightenment and the emergence of Europe's colonial project, asking, with Michael Adas, how the West came to define technological attainment as a measure of social progress and civilization. Then, we will turn our attention to the ways in which modernism questioned these notions of progress, often by resisting new technologies. We will look at the popularization of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as the cult of the primitive in modernist art, from Gauguin and Picasso to Josephine Baker and Woodie Guthrie. We will examine the social construction of technology as a gendered and racialized process and consider the role of the individual consumer in the development of specific technological artifacts, analyzing how certain subcultures actively misappropriated mass-produced technologies. Ultimately, we will look at the fate of the individual in a technocratic society, identifying organizational systems, like bureaucracy, as particular types of technology and exploring how modern Americans responded to these forms of social control.

Requirements

Response Papers 55%

(8 responses out of the 13 weeks of reading, student’s choice)

Research Paper 20%

Participation 25%

Possible Texts

Kline, Consumers in the Country

Mohun, Laundrymen Construct Their World: Gender and the Transformation of a Domestic Task to an Industrial Process

Welke, Recasting American Liberty

Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New

Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris and the Craftsman Ideal in America

Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern

Adas, Machines as the Measures of Men

Friedel, Zipper

Koewenhoven, Made in America

Bijker, Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs

Winner, Autonomous Technology

Moorehouse, Driving Ambitions: An analysis of the American hot rod enthusiasm

Cowan, More Work for Mother: The ironies of household technology from the open hearth to the microwave

Flag(s): Writing

The relationship between Africa and the United States is often imagined simply as a westward movement in which Africans are forcibly transported across the Atlantic as commodities and then violently folded into the fabric of the American experience. While it is true that chattel slavery and African American cultural practices have exerted tremendous influence over the history of the United States, not all movement has been westward. Americans—black and white—have also traveled east, from the United States to Africa, and in the process have developed and reinforced affective bonds that stretch across time and space. This class explores these affective bonds through the lens of first-person narratives read alongside political, economic, cultural, and historic scholarship. We will move forward in time from the Atlantic slave trade to the U.S. Overseas Contingency Operations, but will also trouble the notion that there is a single narrative of the relationship between Africa and the United States, or a singular Africa for Americans to write about. Since this is a writing flag course, students will analyze the historical context in which representations of Africa and Africans circulate through a series of course readings, group discussions, and writing exercises that culminate in a final paper and presentation worth 40% of students’ final grades.

Requirements

4 Reaction Papers:              10% each

Final Paper:                        35%

Final Paper Peer Review:      10%

Final Presentation:                5%

Participation:                      10%

Possible Texts

John H. Ghazvinian, Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route

Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails

Frank B. Wilderson III, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid

Additional course readings will appear on the schedule and be available through Electronic Reserves.

Flag(s): Writing, Global Cultures

Flags: Cultural Diversity in the U.S. and Writing 

Nostalgic images of the nuclear family in the United States present us with the picture of a father, mother, and biologically conceived son and daughter all living in a single family home. As a social institution, the family has experienced many changes in contemporary U.S. society. This course is designed as an introduction to alternative family systems in the United States contextualized in a Post-WWII framework. Asian Americans will serve as our central focus to survey the development of alternative families. The course addresses the historic, more traditional forms of Asian immigration and quickly moves into the ways globalization, transnationalism, imperialism/occupation, mixed race, modern reproductive technologies, and transracial adoptions complicate our understanding of the contemporary family. Examples include transnational Filipino families and caregivers, surrogate motherhood, and South Korean adoption beginning in the Cold War stretching to more contemporary practices in China. This course will incorporate interdisciplinary texts, media sources, and documentary films. A major topic of this course will be to analyze how issues of race and ethnicity inform identity. Additionally, we will explore the ways family formation is situated in history, politics, military engagements, and imperialism. Throughout the course we will also investigate how gender, kinship, and transnationalism intersect and shape our understanding of transracial and transnational families. Many people have different experiences with family formation and this course will examine them through an analytical and critical lens.Throughout the semester this course raises many questions. Examples include but are not limited to: What does it mean to be an immigrant? How are family structures complicated by larger global issues? How does transracial adoption change our understanding of what it means to be “American” or “Asian America?” This class provides a space to examine questions, interpret materials, exchange ideas, and gain an increased understanding of contemporary alternative family formation.

The purpose of this course is to examine the various experiences, perspectives, and expressions of Chicanas in the United States. This involves examining the meaning and history of the term, "Chicana" as it was applied to and incorporated by Mexican American women during the Chicano Movement in areas of the Southwest U.S., such as Texas and California. We will also explore what it means to be Chicana in the United States today. The course will begin with a historical overview of Mexican American women's experiences in the U.S., including the emergence of Chicana feminism. We will discuss central concepts of Chicana feminism and attempt to understand how those concepts link to everyday lived experiences. Specifically, the relationship between gender, race/ethnicity, and class will be key as we discuss issues that have been significant in the experiences and self-identification of Chicanas, such as: family, gender, sexuality, religion/spirituality, education, language, labor, and political engagement. We will be engaging in interdisciplinary analysis not only concerning cultural traditions, values, belief systems, and symbols but also in relation to the expressive culture of Chicanas, including folk and religious practices, literature and poetry, the visual arts, and music. Finally, we will examine media representations of Chicanas through critical analyses of film and television portrayals. 

This class focuses on over a century of Yiddish-based contributions to American culture. Starting from the premise that Yiddish speakers who came to the Promised Land of America brought with them a nuanced ability to deal with hostile environments, this class will look at a variety of readings and movies which manifest the qualities of poignancy, ambition, irony, heart, resiliency, and, of course, humor.

Writers include Isaac Bashevis Singer, Woody Allen, and Michael Chabon; musical content comprises folk and popular standards, as well as contemporary klezmer bands; and movies will run the gamut from Tevye to the Marx Brothers to Blazing Saddles.

Grading:

• 1/3 on class participation
• 1/3 on two 4-page writing assignments
• 1/3 on one 8-page research paper

Texts:

• Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
• Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
• Course packet

Flags: Cultural Divesity in the U.S. and Writing

What is “race,” and what does it mean to be “mixed”? How is mass media responsible for channeling fears, desires, and anxieties about “mixed” bodies? Why are “mixed race” bodies suddenly desirable and chic? Can one exist in two or more categories at the same time? How do people think of “mixedness” in the U.S., and how is it different in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil? Why do people care so much? Why do categories matter? Isn’t everyone “mixed” somehow? Where do you fit in?

This course will give students the tools to critically respond to these questions via a comparative, historically situated study of the representation of "mixed-race" people in popular media. Major attention will be paid to special concerns for Asian American populations; it includes substantial attention to African American and Latino populations. Chiefly U.S.-centered, but with a large transnational comparative component analyzing “mixed” racial formation in: North America, Latin America, Caribbean, Brazil.

Instructor:  Uzendoski, A Areas:  -- / A

Unique #:  35075 Flags:  Cultural Diversity; Writing

Semester:  Fall 2013 Restrictions:  n/a

Cross-lists:  AMS 315F Computer Instruction:  Yes

Prerequisites: E 603A, RHE 306, 306Q, or T C 603A.

Description: This course will explore the diversity of Native American literature. To better understand the many ways that Native American authors express themselves through narrative, we will read a variety of genres: drama, detective fiction, fantasy, science fiction, romance, tragedy and comedy. As a class, we will discuss where and why each author employs genre conventions. How do specific genres allow authors to dramatize and represent social, economic, and political issues? Throughout the course, we will study multiple eras of Native American literary history while also paying particular attention to each text’s specific tribal contexts. Our course texts will include novels, short stories, and plays. This discussion-driven course has been designed with both English majors and non-English majors in mind. The critical writing and analytical reading skills we will develop will help students succeed in upper-division courses in many majors across campus, including English.

Tentative texts include James Welch, Winter in the Blood; Sherman Alexie, The Toughest Indian in the World; Lynn Riggs, The Cherokee Night; Todd Downing, The Cat Screams; Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony; Daniel Heath Justice, Kynship;and selected short stories and critical texts available in a course reader by authors such as Gerald Vizenor, LeAnne Howe, Lisa Brooks, David Treuer, Stephen Graham Jones, and Qwo-Li Driskill.

Requirements & Grading: short critical reading responses (20%); in-class reading responses and participation (10%); two 3-4 page critical essays (20% each); final 5-7 page essay (30%). Students will have the opportunity to revise major writing assignments based on instructor feedback.

In the nineteenth century waves of immigrants from several Central and Northern European countries altered the demographics of Texas significantly while accelerating both economic and agricultural development of the republic and (later) state. Painted churches, dance halls, sausage festivals, etc. still speak to the cultural legacy of these immigrants in large swaths of Texas while, amazingly, pockets of diglossia still survive after several generations. The immigrant story often intertwined with larger themes of Texas history such as frontier, Native Americans, and slavery. Contrasting attitudes and values led to conflict at times, especially during the Civil War, since many of the immigrants openly opposed secession and/or slavery. 

            This course will examine both the push—the causes of European emigration—and the pull—the attraction of Texas as a destination. The goal is to further our understanding of the cultural and social forces at play in the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic and to deepen our appreciation for the positive contributions of the many different European nationalities that have added strands to the rich and colorful tapestry of the state.

            Readings for classroom discussion will all come from online sources, either posted on my website or available through the Handbook of Texas online. It will not be necessary to purchase any books.

            This will be a project-oriented course. We will tour the Briscoe Center for American History Studies, the Texas State Library, and the General Land Office, all located in Austin and all important repositories of primary and secondary source information. Students will do a mini-research paper and short presentation based on research in one or all of these facilities.

Readings for classroom discussion will all come from online sources, either posted on my website or available through the Handbook of Texas online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook) and the Portal of Texas History (http://texashistory.unt.edu/).

Grading:

Participation 35%

Response papers 35%

Final paper 30%

When Harriet Tubman struck out for her own freedom and for that of countless others, she knew that her success depended on an intimate knowledge of the geographic boundaries of slave and fee territory and the network of safe(r) spaces known as the Underground Railroad. When segregationists advocated for laws and policies that reinforced the color line, they spoke from an interest in “keeping blacks in their place.” When current day media executives attempt to market their programming to African American audiences they often frame them in terms of an “urban” market.  As these examples show, social constructions of race and status in the United States have always intersected with social constructions of place.

This course explores these intersecting themes of race and place by considering a range of topics beginning with the formulation of an exclusively white national space from the conquest of indigenous land and the transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. We will also consider various challenges to this white supremacist national logic, from the presence of the Haitian Republic to expressions of black nationalism, diasporic imaginings and exilic critique. We will discuss geographies of plantation slavery and Jim Crow segregation and black resistance to these geographies as individuals and groups such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Marcus Garvey, Anna Julia Cooper, Rosa Parks, and the Freedom Riders forced a reconfiguration of public and private space. We will focus on such iconic black urban and rural spaces such as Harlem, Chicago, New Orleans, the Sea Islands, and more to keep track of the varied and complex politics of race and belonging. This course will provide a theoretical foundation in critical race studies and cultural geography and it will engage a wide variety of media, including speeches, memoir, poetry, music, visual culture, performance culture, film, and television. 

Texts:

May include; Aimé Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land; James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie; Alice Walker, Meridian; Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem is Nowhere and a course packet of excerpts from secondary and primary texts.

Grading breakdown:

3 response papers (2-3 pages): 10% each

summary and outline for the final project, 1 page(5%)

Oral presentation of final project (10-15 minutes) (15%)

Final paper, 8-10 pages (30%)

Participation and preparedness (20%)

Cultural critic Wahneema Lubiano argues that “postmodernisn offers a site for African American cultural critics and producers to utilize a discursive space  that foregrounds the possibility of rethinking history, political positionality in the cultural domain, the relationship between cultural politics and subjectivity, and the politics of narrative aesthetics”. Other scholars such as Cornel West conclude that the Black experience in American is fundamentally absurd. If postmodernism is characterized by a de-centered human subjectivity then the Black condition in the Americans is fundamentally postmodern. This course examines texts that re-imagine Black subjectivity beyond traditional narratives of suffering and oppression. Class participants will become acquainted with a variety of genres such as literary satire, rock musical, faux documentary, and speculative fiction.

Texts:

Paul Beatty “White Boy Shuffle” (1996)

Octavia Butler “Kindred” (1979)

Edward P. Jones “The Known World” (2003)

Andrea Lee “Sarah Phillips” (1984)

Jill Nelson “Volunteer Slavery” (1993)

Baratunde Thurston “How to Be Black” (2012)

Grading breakdown (percentages):

Essay One – 5 pages – 20%

Midterm – 30%

Presentation – 10%

Essay 2 – 7 pages – 30%

Participation – 10%

A half century after the high point of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., most American students learn about the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the 1957 Little Rock conflict over school desegregation, the 1963 March on Washington, and the fire hoses in Birmingham. Far fewer encounter the less-televised moments of civil rights history, the meanings of freedom that included but went beyond desegregation, and the breadth of participation by local people. It is even less common to consider other movements that paralleled the black freedom movement among, for example, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. Taking a comparative perspective, this upper division lecture course explores these aspects of the civil rights era. It also examines their larger historical context within American culture from the Second World War to the present. Finally, we consider questions about the writing of history: What does it mean to look back at such historic events with the benefit of hindsight?  How did they come about?  What changed?  What did not?  

Texts:

Possible texts-

Cone, James H . Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare            :

Mankiller, Wilma. Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. 

Garcia, Mario T. Blowout! Sal Castro and the Chicano Struggle for Educational Justice

Martin, Waldo E.  Brown v. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents

Sellers, Cleveland.  The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC           

Strum, Philippa. Mendez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican American Civil Rights. 

Takaki, Ronald.  Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II

Grading:

Three reading handouts  (5% each, 15% total)

Three in-class exams  (20% each, 60% total)

Five-page essay  (25%)

Regular class attendance (5%)

How and when do cities burn? The modern US city has seen its share of urban unrest, typified by street protests (both organized and spontaneous), the destruction of private property, looting, and fires. Interpretations of urban unrest are varied: some describe it as aimless rioting, others as political insurrection. Most agree that the matter has something to do with the deepening of racism, poverty and violence. This course takes a closer look at the roots of urban unrest, exploring a range of origins: joblessness, state violence, white flight, the backlash against civil rights gains, new immigration and interracial strife. Urban unrest is often cast as an intractable struggle between black and white, yet this course examines the ways in which multiple racial groups have entered the fray. Beyond race and class, the course will also explore unrest as a mode of pushing the normative boundaries of gender and sexuality in public space. Course material will draw from film, literature, history, geography and anthropology.

Required Texts:

The majority of readings will be available as pdf on Blackboard. Students must acquire the following texts:

Robert F. Williams, Negroes With Guns

Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo Mama’s Dysfunctional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America

Dan Georgakis and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution

Robert Gooding Williams eds. Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising

Grading:

Attendance:                                                                                                                                                      

15%

Participation:                                                                                                                                                   

10%

Three Reflection Papers and re-writes [4 pages each] (worth 15% each):

45%

Final [TBD]                                                                                                                                                           

30%

This course focuses “women behaving badly” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America.  We are especially interested in exploring the histories of female murderers and criminals as well as examining the experiences of women who transgressed racial, gendered, and sexual mores; ultimately, we will investigate the tension between accepted social norms and the struggle for female autonomy.

Texts:

Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Duke, 2001)

Kali Gross, Colored Amazons: Black Women, Crime, and Violence in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 (Duke, 2006)

Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (UNC, 1995)

Grading breakdown:

Engaged, critical participation 25%

Weekly writing responses 25%

Midterm Exam 25%

Final Paper 25%

This upper division course examines the history of Blacks in the United States from the West African Heritage to the Civil War and provides a critical examination on central issues under scholarly debate in the reconstruction of the Black experience in America. The course thus engages the debate on the evolution of African-American slavery as a social, economic and political institution, with a special focus on antebellum slavery, including plantation slavery, industrial slavery, and urban slavery in addition to slave culture.

Also, the course assesses the institutional development of the free black community, during the age of slavery, with emphasis on free black protest activities, organizations, and leaders. Equally important, information is provided on the business and entrepreneurial activities of both slave and free blacks before the Civil War to underscore the long historic tradition of black economic self-help. Invariably, those slaves who purchased their freedom were slaves involved in various business enterprises. Also emphasized in the course are the various ways in which slave and free black women responded to slavery and racism before the Civil War, giving consideration to gender issues within the intersection of the dynamics of race, class, and sex.

The course format is primarily lecture, with informal class discussion, utilizing in part the Socratic method of teaching/pedagogy (especially useful for students who are pre-law), as we examine topics that broaden historical consciousness and critical thinking skills, such as: the role Africans played in the Atlantic slave trade; the historical forces that contributed to the origin of racism in Colonial America; the anomaly of black plantation slave owners in a race-based slave society; how white economic disparities and hegemonic masculinities were played out in class subordination and racial oppression; why race takes precedence over class in assessing the black historical experience; the extent to which judicial cases provide a pragmatic assessment of the realities of slave life; the extent to which American law supported the racial subordination of slave and free blacks; whether or not the economic and political imperatives that prompted antebellum African American settlement in West Africa can be considered colonialist in design and intent.

These and other questions will bring to the forefront the central issue of the agency of African Americans in their attempts to survive racism and slavery in attempts forge their own political and economic liberation. This course, consequently, emphasizes both the deconstruction of prevailing assessments and interpretations of the African American experience as well as provides information for a new reconstruction of the Black Experience from slavery to freedom. In each instance, emphasis will be on exploring different historical interpretations of the Black Experience.

African American slaves did not lead a monolithic slave experience. They shared life-time, hereditary, involuntary servitude, racial oppression and subordination. But many manipulated the institution and slave codes in attempts to mitigate that oppression. Others, such as Nat Turner and Dred Scott used other means to bring about an end to their servitude, while free blacks also fought to end slavery as well as improve their economic, societal and legal status.

The primary purposes of this course, then, are 1) to develop an understanding of the nature of historical inquiry and 2). to heighten historical consciousness 3), encourage critical thinking and analysis of historical material and 4) to recognizing the difference between what might have happened and what actually happened to blacks, both slave and free blacks during the age of slavery to the Civil War.

Texts:

Franklin, John H. and Alfred Moss, FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM, 9th ed

Holt, T. and Barkley-Brown, E. MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY, vol 1

Owens, Leslie, T

HIS SPECIES OF PROPERTY: SLAVE LIFE AND CULTURE IN THE OLD SOUTH

Tyler, Ron and Lawrence, R. Murphy, The Slave Narratives of Texas

Walker, Juliet E. K., FREE FRANK: A BLACK PIONEER ON THE ANTEBELLUM FRONTIER

Walker, Juliet E. K., THE HISTORY OF BLACK BUSINESS IN AMERICA: CAPITALISM, RACE, ENTREPRENEURSHIP

White, Deborah G.  AREN’T I A WOMAN:  FEMALE SLAVES PLANTATION SOUTH

Grading:

MID-TERM EXAM    35%

RESEARCH PAPER   30%

EXAM 2 (TAKE-HOME)  35%

This course is an introduction to the intellectual and social sources of evangelical Protestant traditions in the United States. It examines varieties of evangelical beliefs and practices. In the first section of the course, we address the self-professed ethical struggle of evangelicals to be in but not of the world.  We historically contextualize that struggle, tracing its more recent expressions back to the categorical rupture between sacred “selves” and profane “society” that was at the heart of the Protestant Reformation.  In our second section of readings, we study how evangelicals continually work out this ethical tension in their everyday lives.  Surveying a range of themes, including science, sexuality, politics, and environmentalism, we examine how evangelicals have defined themselves in opposition to secular society but also have engaged the secular in an effort to convert souls, manage personal behavior, and transform American society in their image of Christian community. By the end of this course, students should be able to defensibly define “who is an American evangelical.”  They should be able to construct a broad historical narrative of nineteenth and twentieth century American evangelicalism.  And they should be able to use this narrative to evaluate evangelical encounters in the twenty-first century with at least one sub-type of American culture listed on the syllabus.

Grading:

Attendance/Participation 15%Reading Response Journal 25%Short Essays 25%Final Essay 35%

Texts:

Mark Noll, American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction (2001).Additional readings posted on Blackboard.

This lecture course traces the development of American cultural history from the time of the Puritan migration of 1630 through the end of the Civil War in 1865.  The basic premise of the course is that cultural history can best be understood by examining common themes that cut across such wide-ranging fields as religion, literature, art, science, philosophy, and popular culture.  Building from this base, the course explores such themes as the opposition of "young" America to "old" Europe, the continuing struggle between the individual and the community, the significance of the frontier, the impact of evangelical Protestantism, the idea of an American "mission," the emergence of industry, the paradox of liberty and slavery, and the awakening of regionalism and pluralism in opposition to the mainstream.

The course format consists of formal lectures (with questions and discussion encouraged) and several designated discussion periods.  Assigned reading is not always discussed in class but must be completed all the same.  Prior knowledge of basic U.S. history is helpful.

Requirements

Two in-class tests (20% and 35% of the course grade) and a final exam (45%).  A student who makes at least a B on the first test may substitute a 10-page paper in place of the second test with the approval of the instructor.

Possible Texts

Five or six paperbacks and some articles including material like the following:

Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed

Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine

David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

Upper-division standing required. Partially fulfills legislative requirement in American History.

Flag(s): Cultural Diversity

White Protestant males and their ideas dominated America up until the time of the Civil War.  For better or worse, this progressively becomes less true after this time.  Americans faced with what the philosopher William James called “a booming buzzing confusion” developed many new ways of coping with massive change.  In addition to such conventional historical topics as politics and economics, we will examine the fine arts, architecture, technology, science, social reform, literature, photography, documentary film, and literature.  We will also note the roles and lives of immigrants, minority groups, and women in the conversation.

Requirements

Three exams, all non-cumulative.

Possible Texts

Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick

John Kasson, Amusing the Millions

Willa Cather, My Antonia

Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion

Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl

William Doyle, An American Insurrection: The Battle of Oxford, Mississippi

Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

Upper-division standing required. Partially fulfills legislative requirement in American History.

Flag(s): Cultural Diversity

Within the construct of African American Business history, race, contemporary American popular culture and global capitalism, this course will focus on an important aspect in the contemporary political economy of black Americans. Specifically, the commodification (sale) of black culture provides the conceptual frame for an examination of the phenomenon of both the superstar black athlete as an entrepreneur and the Hip Hop Superstar as an entrepreneur in post-Civil Rights America. The emphasis in this course, then, is to critically examine and analyze the impact of a multiplicity of societal, cultural and economic factors in the post-modern information age, propelled by new technologies in the New Economy of Global Capitalism.  Also, consideration will be given to the new diversity as it impacts on the political economy of African Americans.

Proceeding from an interdisciplinary perspective, the course considers both the financial successes of superstar black athletes and hip hop entrepreneurs as well as their emergence as cultural icons, contrasted with the comparatively overall poor performance of Black Business not only within the intersection of race, gender, class, but also within the context of transnationalism in the globalization sale of African American Culture in post-Civil Rights America. But who profits?

Most important, why is it that business receipts for African Americans, who comprise almost thirteen percent of this nation's population, amounted in 2007 to only .5%, that is, less than one (1) percent of the nation's total business receipts? In addition, why is it that among the various occupational categories in which blacks participate in the nation's economy, especially as businesspeople, that black entertainers and sports figures are the highest paid? What does this say about race, class, gender and hegemonic masculinities in America at the turn of the new century?

Texts:

Boyd, Todd,      Young, Black, Rich and Famous:  The Rise of the NBA, The Hip Hop Invasion and the Transformation of American Culture

Curry, Mark,         Dancing With the Devil: How Puff Burned the Bad Boys of Hip Hop

Daniels, Cora,     Black Power, Inc: The New Voice of Black Success

Johnson,  Magic,    32  Ways to Be a Champion in Business

Kitwana, Bakari,   Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America

Lafeber, Walter, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism, New Expanded Edition

Oliver, Richard, Tim Leffel, Hip-Hop, Inc. : Success Strategies of the Rap Moguls   

Pulley, Brett, The Billion Dollar BET: Robert Johnson and the Inside Story of BET

Smith-Shomade, Beretta, Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy: Selling Black Entertainment Television           

Walker, Juliet E. K. History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship

Chaps, 6-11; Course Packet “The Commodification of Black Culture”   

Grading:

Critical Book Review Analysis                           25%

    (5 reviews, 2-3 pages 5 points each)

Class Discussion/participation                             25%

Oral Summary of Research Paper                         5%

Seminar Research Paper (15 pages)                    45%

Taking the precariousness of black life as its point of departure, Afro Pessimism is a rising interdisciplinary critical discourse which both explores the personal, cultural and political afterlife of Atlantic slavery and attempts to reformulate intellectual agendas, cultural production, and black politics around slavery’s living catastrophes. We will critically engage leading figures of this unsettling and controversial subfield of black studies with a view to enlarging our understandings of contemporary crises of black mortality, poverty, mass imprisonment, and racialized violence, among others; and to acquiring a scholarly appraisal of this disturbing but important literature.                 

Requirements

8-10 page Final paper (30%);

2  3-4 page critical analyses (30%);

4 in-class reading quizzes (20%)

Participation (20%)

Possible Texts

Baldwin, No Name in the Street

Patterson, Slavery and Social Death

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Butler, Kindred

Hartman, Scenes of Subjection

Wilderson, Red, White, and Black

Moten, In the Break

Robinson, Black Marxism

Butler, Precarious Life

West, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization”

Upper-division standing required. Students may not enroll in more than two AMS 370 courses in one semester.

Flag(s): Writing, Cultural Diversity

Race has been key in defining citizenship since the founding of the United States of America. From the earliest treaties with Indians to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Jones Act, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, race has outweighed citizenship in determining the rights of individuals in this country. In this course we will use primary and secondary sources to analyze how race and citizenship have functioned for populations of color in the United States. We will examine events in U.S. history and consider how citizenship impacts the histories of various groups as well as the writing of their histories

Texts:

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, George Lipsitz

A packet of required readings will be available at Jenn’s on Guadalupe at Dean Keaton.

A few required readings will be available on Blackboard.

The bulk of the reading for this course will be from materials you collect for your research project.

Additional readings to be determined.

Grading:

This has been designated and designed as a writing-intensive course. As such, writing will be a significant part of the workload for this course, and the bulk of your grade will be determined by your writing.

The final paper will count for 50% of the final grade. Class participation will count for 20% of your final grade. The remaining thirty percent will be based on shorter writing assignments.

This interdisciplinary course explores the histories, cultures, and experiences of im/migration to the U.S. by examining cultural productions (literary and visual narratives and texts) alongside legal discourses (legislation, federal court cases, legal scholarship) and historical analyses.  Informed by critical race theory, ethnic studies, and cultural studies scholarship, we will pay particular attention to the tensions between the legal discourses and practices that seek to regulate and manage im/migrants and the cultural productions that expose and articulate the limits and contradictions of the law.  Some questions we will consider through the semester include: What are defining encounters that have shaped im/migrant lives and cultures?  How do cultural studies inform our understanding of what it means to be an im/migrant under U.S. law?  How have im/migrants challenged notions of U.S. nationhood and legal regimes? 

We will begin by considering what is at stake in looking at cultural and legal texts together within a comparative ethnic studies frame.  The course then examines the closing and opening of U.S. borders to regulate the entry of im/migrants, giving particular attention to the case of Chinese Exclusion—the first racially/ethnically based prohibition on immigration.  We will also pay close attention to the relations between capitalism/labor and nation.  The course concludes by considering questions of naturalization and the limits of citizenship, particularly in light of recent “crises” over immigration.

Requirements

Attendance and Participation in class and on Blackboard website: 10%

Collaborative Presentations: 10%

Accompanying paper on presentation material (4 pages): 10%

Paper 1 (5 pages):  25%

Peer Review and Major Revision of Paper 1: 10%

Paper 2 (7-8 pages): 35%

Possible Texts

Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Maxine Hong Kingston, Chinamen

Fae Myenne Ng, Bone

Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker

Josefina Lopez, Real Women Have Curves

John Mraz and Jamie Vélez-Storey, Uprooted: Braceros in the Hermanos Mayo’s Lens

Films

Frieda Lee Mock, Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision

Stephanie Black, H-2 Worker

Robert Kenner, Food, Inc.

Robert Rodriguez, Machete

Additional book chapters, articles, and legal primary source documents.

Upper-division standing required. Students may not enroll in more than two AMS 370 courses in one semester.

Flag(s): Writing, Cultural Diversity

In this class we will explore the major social movements and the political, cultural and intellectual developments of the 1960s, as well as their origins in the 1950s and earlier.  These include post-war liberalism; the Great Society and the War on Poverty; the New Left; the Free Speech Movement; the peace movement; the Civil Rights movement; nationalist and liberation movements among African Americans, Chicanos, Asian Americans, American Indians, gays and lesbians, and women; the youth movement and counterculture; the conservative movement; and the environmental movement.  Throughout, we shall seek to learn not only what happened, but also why it happened; moreover, as members of a university community, we will be attentive to the question of how political and social activity in the 1960s, activity inspired largely by young people in and around universities, has affected our lives today and our relationship to politics and civic life.

In the 1960s spirit of “participatory democracy” this class will be run as something of a cooperative enterprise.  Rather than working on the model of expert teacher and student receptacles-of-knowledge, as students you will be actively contributing to the course content through your own research and presentations to the class.  In other words, your active participation is essential to the success of the course.  If you were hoping for a more passive learning experience, you should look elsewhere.

Requirements

Formal presentation

Two 4-6 page papers

One eight-to-ten page paper requiring research and revision

Regular informed participation in on-line blackboard discussion and in-class discussion

Regular attendance is also mandatory

Possible Texts

Andrew Jameson and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties

Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s

Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, Takin’ It To the Streets: A Sixties Reader

Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Upper-division standing required. Students may not enroll in more than two AMS 370 courses in one semester.

Flag(s): Writing, Cultural Diversity

This course intensively examines U.S. women's history between World War II and the 1970s. In doing so, it also explores popular perceptions of womanhood, manhood and sexuality that became central to the cultural politics and social conflicts of the postwar period. By weaving together these topics – women’s history, popular culture, and postwar social movements – we raise fresh questions about well-known episodes of U.S. history. Why, for example, do most Americans remember Rosa Parks only as a demure seamstress who initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott because she was too tired to give up her seat to a white? If every young woman hoped to be like Donna Reed or June Cleaver in the fifties, then where did the sixties movements come from? We also explore how various groups (e.g., suburban girls, working-class women, civil rights activists, immigrants, and others) negotiated ideas of family, work and sexuality. In doing so, we examine roots of issues that continue to have political purchase today, such as reproductive rights, sexuality, job equity, welfare, race, and ethnicity.

Course Activities:This is primarily a discussion seminar, but class will occasionally include short lectures and films. Readings include historical documents, memoirs, scholarly articles and full-length historical studies. The course has a writing flag, and is designed to help you develop skills in historical writing and analysis. Students will write regularly to encourage critical thinking and class discussion of readings. Graded assignments include weekly reading summaries, a short media research paper based on popular magazines of the postwar era; and a “Postwar Women’s Memoir Project” based on interviews with women who came of age between World War II and the 1970s.

Texts:

* Bailey, Beth. Sex in the Heartland

* Douglas, Susan J. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media 

* Gilmore, Stephanie, ed. Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States

* Grace, Nancy M. and Ronna C. Johnson, eds., Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers

* Lee, Chana Kai. For Freedom’s Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer

* Meyerowitz, Joanne, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (noted as NJC on syllabus)

* Santiago, Esmeralda. Almost a Woman

* Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography

Grading:

10% Attendance, promptness, class participation

30% 350-word weekly analyses of readings (6 essays, 5% each)

20% Media research essay, 5 pages 

35% Final Postwar Women’s Memoir Project essay, 8-10 pages

5%  Group Presentation on Memoir Projects

As the popularity of Hollywood disaster films can attest, Americans relish the spectacle of disaster.  This course will examine “natural” and human-made disasters as key turning points in American history.  Whether fire, hurricane, toxin, or epidemic, moments of crisis frequently heighten the visibility of race, gender, and class inequalities, as well as propel, or retard social change.  This class requires students to question what is “natural,” to analyze the relationship between race and environmental policies, and to develop a historical view of disasters and American identities and transformations.  This class will engage with the politics of disasters, analyzing environmental contexts, grassroots activism, legislative policies, and approaches toward commemoration.  Possible topics to be covered include the Triangle Factory fire of 1911, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, AIDS, the Los Angeles Riots of 1965 and 1992, The Chicago Heat Wave of 1995, and Hurricane Katrina (2005). 

Requirements

Class participation:           25%

Group Presentation:          10%

Paper #1:                        15%

Paper #2:                        20%

Final Paper:                     30%

Possible Texts

Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History 

Anna Deveare Smith, Twilight Los Angeles

Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway: A True Story

Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, 25th Anniversary Edition

Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice

Upper-division standing required. Students may not enroll in more than two AMS 370 courses in one semester.

Flag(s): Writing, Cultural Diversity

This course is an interdisciplinary investigation of artists in American society, including (but not limited to) Anne Bradstreet, Junot Diaz, Kara Walker, Talking Heads, Jimi Hendrix, Walt Whitman, Michael Moore, Dorothea Lange, Marlon Riggs, Bob Dylan, Anna Deveare Smith, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Spike Lee, David Lynch, and anonymous street artists. In addition to studying individual photographers, musicians, writers, and filmmakers who have made powerful statements about American culture and its history, we will be looking at the changing function of art in our society over the past 400 years. Our fundamental questions will often explore the intersection of art and politics: How have American artists conceptualized the United States visually, aurally, and in literature? How have they envisioned American identities? What mythologies about the United States they endorsed or defied? The course will investigate these and other questions about the roles that artists have played in our cultural history.

Requirements

Class participation and weekly journals:                  30%    

Presentation:                  20%

5-7 page paper based on a visit to the Blanton Museum of Art:                  20%

10-12 page research paper:                  30%

Possible Texts

Anna Deveare Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles

David Mamet, Glengarry Glen Ross

Bart Beaty, David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence

Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Dangerous Border Crossers: The Artist Talks Back

Ed Guererro, Do The Right Thing

Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return

Robert Coles & Dorothea Lange, Dorothea Lange: Photographs Of A Lifetime

Bob Dylan, Chronicles

Eleanor Coppola,Notes On The Making Of Apocalypse Now

Miranda July,No One Belongs Here More Than You

Upper-division standing required. Students may not enroll in more than two AMS 370 courses in one semester.

Flag(s): Writing

The word “radical” encompasses a wide variety of meanings, including being different, “other,” new, extreme, awesome, and even of the Left.  Radical suggests a “black sheep” quality, or an inability to fit into standard operating procedure.  This course will use the word “radical” to examine the social positioning and history of Latinas/os in the United States.  Specifically, we will use this framework to analyze the histories of Latinas/os who have gone against mainstream expectations, or who have challenged or critiqued the status quo in provocative and unexpected ways.  The class will examine a wide range of radical representations, from “radical” activists like Emma Tenayuca, Luisa Moreno, Lolita Lebron, and Reies López Tijerina, to radical social movements like the Brown Berets and the Young Lords, to radical films like Salt of the Earth, to radical artists like Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Asco, and Raphael Montañez Ortiz.  In looking at what is considered extreme, out of the ordinary, or unusual, the class is equally invested in what is appropriate, ordinary, traditional, and everyday.                 

Requirements

Participation:                            20%

Response Paper #1:                  10%

Response Paper #2:                  20%

Response Paper #3:                  20%

Final Research Paper:                30%

Possible Texts

Culture Clash, Culture Clash in America

Cherrie Moraga, Heroes and Saints and Other Plays

Luis Valdez, The Mummified Deer and Other Plays

Guillermo Verdecchia, Fronteras Americanas / American Borders

Darrel Enck-Wanzer, ed., The Young Lords, a Reader

Reies Lopez Tijerina, They Called Me "King Tiger": My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights

Upper-division standing required. Students may not enroll in more than two AMS 370 courses in one semester.

Flag(s): Writing