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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
Taking its title from the Wallace Stevens poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which interprets the blackbird in different ways, this course similarly explores a more complex, multi-layered perspective on jazz, from jazz and American democracy to jazz in visual art. Accordingly, the course introduces students to several genres, including historical documents, cultural criticism, music, literature, film, photography and art. The course does not draw on a musicological method but rather a socio-cultural analysis of the concept, music and its effect--so students are not required to have any prior musical knowledge or ability. In this writing intensive course, students will write short close analyses of multiple types of media, ultimately building up to an argumentative essay. This EDI course explores the musical expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which representations of jazz signify on institutional power, reaffirm dominant U.S. and/or European hierarchies of race, gender and class, and signal inequality in order to contest it.
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3.00 Credits
This course introduces students to the content and contours of Africana Studies as a vibrant field of knowledge. Through exploration of the genealogy, disciplinary diversity, and evolution of the field, we will examine the depth and range of experiences of African-descended peoples throughout the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. We will also give some attention to how members of the Diaspora remember and encounter Africa, as well as their diverse responses to the history of enslavement, colonialism, apartheid, racism, and globalization. Through materials that embrace both historical and contemporary perspectives, we seek to help students develop critical frameworks for understanding African diasporic experience while simultaneously illumining disjunctures and challenges for the field. This course features two pedagogical strategies: 1) a rotational, interdisciplinary approach that includes the expertise, methods, and specializations of Africana faculty; and 2) the incorporation of aesthetic materials--film, photography, music, dance, performance, and artwork--to enhance student ability to draw ongoing connections between visual and textual sources covered in the course. Close textual analysis, vibrant debate, and engaging discourse are expected.
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3.00 Credits
To be an "American" means something more than U.S. citizenship. In this course, we focus on the problems and possibilities of American identity. Access to Americanness is shaped by factors such as class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, and region--categories which themselves change in meaning over time. Given the geographical, racial, and cultural diversity of the United States, the ways in which Americans imagine nation inevitably vary over time, according to place, and among different individuals and groups. Rather than a survey of any one aspect or period of American history, literature, or popular culture, this course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, a field defined both by the range of texts we read (essays, novels, autobiographies, photographs, films, music, architecture, historical documents, legal texts), and by the questions we ask of them: How have different Americans imagined what it means to be an American? What ideas about national history, patriotism, and moral character shape their visions of Americanness? How do the educational system, mass media, government policies regarding citizenship and immigration shape American identities? How are boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the nation drawn? What uses have been made of the claim to an American identity, and what is at stake in that claim? How have Americans imagined a national landscape, a national culture, and to what ends?
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3.00 Credits
Hollywood cinema has long been fascinated with the border between the United States and Mexico. This course will examine representations of the U.S.-Mexico border, Mexican Americans, and Chicana/os in both Hollywood film and independent media. We will consider how positions on nationalism, race, gender, identity, migration, and history are represented and negotiated through film. We will begin by analyzing Hollywood "border" and gang films before approaching Chicana/o-produced features, independent narratives, and experimental work. This course will explore issues of film and ideology, genre and representation, nationalist resistance and feminist critiques, queer theory and the performative aspects of identity.
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3.00 Credits
No course description available.
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3.00 Credits
Historically, African Americans have been treated as group members rather than as individuals by mainstream society; consequently, a very unique set of political attitudes and behaviors have developed among Blacks in the United States. This course explores the political history of African Americans as well as the relationship between African Americans and the American political system. Political elites as well as individual citizens and grassroots movements have influenced Black politics. In turn, we will focus on how national, state, and local governments have affected African American communities through the implementation of policies?some of which have been discriminatory while others have been aimed to ameliorate racial disparities. We will also analyze how Black Americans have responded through the political system. Since this course (nor any course) has the capacity to explore the vast history of Black politics, we will focus primarily on contemporary, African American politics between 1960 and the Obama era. Class time will be divided between lectures and class discussions.
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3.00 Credits
Althea Gibson to the Williams Sisters. Julius (Dr. J) Irving to Michael Jordan. Jesse Owens to Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Throughout the 20th century, black athletes have broken through Jim Crow restraints, challenged racial stereotypes, and taken their sports to new heights of achievement. In this course, students will explore a range of black athletes in the 20th century, paying particular attention to the attitudes, stereotypes and experiences they endured. In addition, this course will prompt students to analyze the representation, perception, and commodification of black athletes in popular media forms. Students will trace trends, shifts and themes in representations of blackness across different sports and historical periods. Topics under study may include resistance against and affirmation of athletes as role models, racial slurs in sports broadcasting, common themes in commercialized images of the black male athlete, and distinctions in media coverage based on race and gender. Texts will include everything from critical essays and sociological studies to commercials and documentary films. In their final projects, students may put their newfound knowledge to the test by exploring their campus or hometown to investigate the role that race plays on their own playing field. This EDI course explores the experiences and expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which representations of black athleticism are manipulated to increase financial strength and institutional power, reaffirm dominant U.S. and/or European hierarchies of race, gender and class, and signal inequality in order to combat it.
Prerequisite:
Open to all
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3.00 Credits
Arabs have been a part of the tapestry of the United States since the early 19th century. As immigrants to the new world, the identity of this community has largely been defined by changing American understandings of race, ethnicity, and religion. The in-betweenness of this minority group--not exactly white or black, claiming Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths--and the often contradictory nature of U.S. involvement in the region, has only further confounded Americans in their understanding of this diverse community. This course will use an interdisciplinary approach to explore the rich histories, representations, and cultural production of this American minority group. For the purposes of this survey, we will also consider the narratives of other Muslim minority groups (i.e., Iranians, Pakistanis, Indians, and African American Muslims) within the scope of the Arab American experience. We will look at poems and stories from Arab immigrants in the early to mid 20th century (e.g., the Mahjar poets) and consider, in the context of these writings, issues of xenophobia, assimilation, linguistic, and cultural difference, and Arab American identity in the context of other ethnic groups. Throughout this course we will continue to think about how changing U.S. geo-political interests in the region alter perceptions of Arabs and Muslims in our midst (considering, for example, the 1979 Revolution in Iran and the subsequent hostage crisis, the two Gulf Wars, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, 9/11, Afghanistan, the War on Terror, and Guantanamo). In addition, we will examine representations of this minority and Islam more generally in the media and popular culture (print and broadcast journalism, films, cartoons, popular songs, and videos), as well as Arab cultural forms that seek to self-narrate the Arab experience for an American viewer. At the heart of this course is a desire to not only shed light on what it means to be an Arab or a Muslim or an immigrant, but also to understand the multiple ways in which we conceptualize and seek to define what it means to be American.
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3.00 Credits
Toni Morrison has described her writing as guided by a musician's imperative always to hold something in reserve, to leave her audience wanting something more. It's a simple idea, but a strange one--that a reader's desire might be fulfilled only by its increase, that its satisfaction requires that it is never enough. African American writing, in all its richness and variety, moves between never enough and something more; this course will introduce just a few of the historical experiences, intellectual currents, cultural resources, thematic preoccupations, and formal strategies encountered in this writing, and consider how and to what ends African American literary tradition(s) have been organized, in critical and polemical ways, by individual writers and scholars, and by artistic and political movements. We'll forego the perspective of a grand overview, diving right in instead, and we won't necessarily always reach for the best-known titles by the most famous authors. In any case, by the end of the course, you should be prepared to have more left to read than you did at the beginning.
Prerequisite:
A 100-level English course
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3.00 Credits
he objective of this course is to broadly examine the meanings and significance of different forms of religious practices and beliefs among Asian Americans. It treads across many layers of diversity--from religious traditions to ethnicity, place, and time--and we will draw upon theoretically-based historical, anthropological and sociological perspectives to understand their complexities, convergences, and (dis)continuities. Thus, although the course is focused on the religious life of Asians in the U.S., it also grounds and connects this topic to Asia, societal phenomenon that shaped this society and its people, and contemporary global manifestations such as migration and diasporization. Books will include: Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang, Asian American Religions; Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America; Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down; Kenneth J. Guest, God in Chinatown; Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Becoming American? The Forging of Arab and Muslim Identity in Pluralist America; Khyati Y. Joshi, New Roots in America's Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America.
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