The goal of this class is to teach students to understand everyday landscapes as cultural spaces that illuminate the history of social and political developments in the United States. Many of us will arrive thinking of landscape as a type of painting or photograph, or the view from a hotel window or moving car. But over the course of the term, we will learn to interpret landscapes for evidence of past and current social relationships, between but not limited to issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and generation. We will be particularly interested in the political economy of landscapes, and several of the readings will explore the connections between landscape and public policy. The readings also encourage a broad understanding of landscape across genres—painting, photography, fiction, journalism—and extending to virtual landscapes. Students consider the topic from multiple vantage points, through the works of historians such as Mike Davis, Lizabeth Cohen, and William Cronin; architectural historians Dell Upton, John Michael Vlach, and Delores Hayden; and art historians Simon Schama and Elizabeth Johns. We will also read original source materials, including newspapers and illustrated magazines, and examine paintings, photographs and other elements of visual culture.
This course explores old and new formations of the United States through culture and politics. At a critical juncture in the historical production of the nation, we approach the “American imaginary” formed not only at home, but also abroad. Is it possible now, has it ever been possible, to think of nationality as remaining within the geographical borders of the nation-state? If we believe that race, ethnicity, gender and class are central to all narratives of domestic social life, how might “difference” mark the world outside, that is both apart from and a part of the United States? And instead of the conventional story of the United States once being stable and whole and now being diverse and fractured, might we reconceive of the United States as always having been in formation? In beginning to answer these queries, we grapple with empire, as both an analytical tool and a geopolitical force. We also engage with empire's consequences: the projection of specific political-economic interests onto the world and the rise of liberatory forms of solidarity across boundaries and new regional constructions.
The presumption that empire is both the interior and exterior of the United States requires us to more broadly explore the spatiality of the nation and comprehend where and what its center and periphery are. That American Studies question will be addressed through interdisciplinary techniques of reading and interpretation, with a consideration of a wide variety of textual materials: novels, histories, political essays, films and more. Our work to understand culture always encompasses the artifacts of the imagination and the everyday life-worlds of people. The theories and methods of a transnational American studies are ours to develop through active discussion and writing.
The aim of this core course is to introduce students to the field of American studies. In the first six-weeks we will explore models of American studies scholarship covering the period from 1880-1930. Our primary and secondary readings will address, in particular, issues of urbanism, race, religion, and empire, and from this introduction we will develop a good sense of what American studies scholars do. The final eight weeks of the semester will attend more specifically to the history of the American studies movement and the major theoretical and methodological approaches that practitioners in the field have developed.
These final eight weeks will proceed in stages, each linked to a critical phase in the development of American studies: the Search for the American Character (1930s-1950s); Liberation Movements (1960s-1980s); Cultural Studies and Mass Media (1970s-1990s); Deconstructing the “American” in American Studies (1990s-2000s). Here our readings will consist of primary sources (including film, music, painting, photography, and fiction), secondary scholarly works, and various articles about the state of American studies itself. We will come to see that while each new set of analytical tools and perspectives arose in response to particular historical circumstances, the field as a whole has continued to make use of the various methodologies and theories developed under previous circumstances, thereby adding to the richness of American studies approaches.
This is a seminar that focuses on how race has been conceptualized in the humanities and life sciences in the twentieth century, and how it has been represented in novels, films, and the new media. Our primary focus will be on theories and representations of race-mixing (the melting pot, mestizaje, etc.).
Texts include: Imitation of Life; José Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race; George Schuyler, Black No More; Sinclair Lewis, Kingsblood Royal; Hollywood Shuffle; Gloria Anzaldúa, La Frontera/New Mestiza; James Baldwin, Evidence of Things Not Seen; George Yancey, Who Is White?; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of A Different Color; and Matthew Pratt Guterl, Color of Race; Richard Delgado, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction; Mixed Race Studies: A Reader. Requirements are: active participation, written responses (2-3 pp.) to readings throughout the semester, a research paper, and an exam.
for AMST 9500
This course traces the genealogy of theories on race and ethnicity that originated in the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology) but have spread into interdisciplinary American Studies: biological essentialism, phrenology, eugenics, race as social construct vs. culture, ethnicity and ethnic communities, assimilation and integration, national/ethnic traits, primordial attachments, primitivism vs. modernity, discrimination, race prejudice, racial performativity, etc. While many of these concepts have been disavowed and function mainly as objects of critical inquiry in contemporary scholarship, a residue of these ideas continues to animate and structure scholarly work on ethnic literatures and social history. Our readings will be a mixture of primary texts from the social sciences (anthropologists Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict, sociologists Robert Park and Erving Goffman, W.E.B. DuBois's sociological work The Philadelphia Negro, Zora Neale Hurston's anthropological collection of African American folklore, Mules and Men, social psychologist Kenneth Clark), contemporary scholarship (Henry Yu's Thinking Orientals, Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color, Werner Sollors' Beyond Ethnicity, Hortense Spiller's Black, White and in Color, Philip Deloria's Playing Indian, Anne Cheng's The Melancholy of Race, Antonio Viego's Dead Subjects), and films, documentaries, and performance pieces that play with these social scientific, ethnographic constructs (Nanook of the North, Bontoc Eulogy, Cannibal Tours, The Couple in the Cage).
This workshop is for American Studies majors who have been admitted to the DMP program. Students will discuss the progress of their own and each other's papers, with particular attention to the research and writing processes. At the instructor's discretion, students will also read key works in the field of American Studies.