Cultural Encounters in American Film
Th 1.30-4.30 HGS 220A
Interconnections of displacement, knowledge, and discovery of cultural difference through travel, as shown in ethnographic, documentary, and feature films. The cultural observation, witnessing, and critique that films make possible. The ethics of producing and consuming representations of cultural difference. Insights into the paradoxical ways in which the story of the observer meshes with the story of the observed. Screenings in class.
East Asia in U.S. Literature and Film
T 7.00-9.00p TTh 2.30-3.45 LC 209
An introductory course on American images of Asia and Asian America in twentieth-century literature and cinema.
Ethnicity, Race, and Material Culture
T 2.30-4.20 STOECK 211
Ways that members of ethnic, racial, and religious groups have used objects to articulate their identities. Cultural expressions ranging from food to fashion as they have created a shared sense of belonging across racial, class, and geographic divides, while also serving as markers to separate groups. Political meanings of quintessentially American objects as varied as the Lincoln Memorial, homespun, Cadillacs, and Coca-Cola.
Interrogating the Crisis of Islam: Seminar
T 1.30-3.20 CO493 110
In official and unofficial discourses in the U.S., diagnoses of Islam's various "crises" are ubiquitous, and Muslim "hearts and minds" are viewed as the "other" front in the War on Terror. Since 9/11, the U.S. State Department has made the reform of Islam an explicit national interest, pouring billions of dollars into USAID projects in Muslim-majority countries, initiating curriculum development programs for madrasas in South Asia, and establishing the Arabic Radio Sawa and the satellite TV station Al-Hurra to propagate the U.S. administration's political views as well as what it terms a "liberal" strain of Islam. Muslim Americans are also consumed by debates about the "crisis" of Islam, a crisis of religious authority in which the nature and rapidity of change in the measures of authority are felt to be too difficult to assimilate. This course maps out the various and deeply politically charged contemporary debates about the "crisis of Islam" and the question of Islamic reform through an examination of official U.S. policy, transnational pulp Islamic literature, fatwas and essays authored by internationally renowned Muslim jurists and scholars, and historical and ethnographic works that take up the category of crisis as an interpretive device.
Race, Identity, and the Human Psyche
W 2.30-4.30 WALL81 301
The role of race in the construction of identity. Exploration of the psychic implications of racialization and the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality as they manifest in psychical ways. Sources include literary texts, films, and readings from psychoanalytic theory.
American Legal History: Citizenship and Race
Th 6.00-8.00p WALL81 201
The seminar examines the evolution of U.S. citizenship as defined and interpreted by courts during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the way historical events that defined race have affected citizenship. Topics of study include the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, Reconstruction legislation, immigration restrictions imposed on Asians, legislation impacting the racial classification of Mexicans, statutes governing the citizenship of indigenous native peoples, racially based prohibitions against voting, education, and employment, and efforts to reduce them by civil rights legislation culminating with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Each seminar participant has to research several topics and make a presentation to the class on at least one topic. Engagement in seminar discussion and the drafting of research papers are the basis for grading.
