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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
This lecture and discussion course focuses on the politics of personal style among U.S. women of color in an era of viral video clips, the 24-hour news cycle, and e-commerce sites dedicated to the dermatological concerns of "minority" females. With a comparative, transnational emphasis on the ways in which gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and class inform standards of beauty, we will examine a variety of materials ranging from documentary films, commercial websites, poetry and sociological case studies to feminist theory. Departing from the assumption that personal aesthetics are intimately tied to issues of power and privilege, we will engage the following questions: What are the everyday functions of personal style among women of color? Is it feasible to assert that an easily identifiable "African-American," "Latina," or "Asian-American" female aesthetic exists? What role do transnational media play in the development and circulation of popular aesthetic forms? How might the belief in personal style as a tactic of resistance challenge traditional understandings of what it means to be a "feminist" in the first place? Readings include works by Julie Bettie, Rosalinda Fregoso, Tiffany M. Gill, Margaret L. Hunter, Linda Leung, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Ramirez, Felicity Schaefer-Grabiel, and Sandra K. Soto, among others.
Prerequisite:
LATS 105, AFR 200, AMST 201, WGSS 101 or permission of the instructor
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3.00 Credits
"Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in written texts or in human memory...I tell you that on the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise." As far as we know, the name "California" was first written in this passage by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, ca. 1510. Within a few decades, it came to be placed first on the peninsula of Baja California and then upon a region stretching up the Western coast of North America. What aspects of this vision are still drawn upon in how we imagine California today? How did certain narratives of California come to be, who has imagined California in certain ways, and why? What is the relationship between certain myths, the peoples who have imagined them, and the other peoples who have shared California dreams? In this course, we will examine some of the myths that surround California by looking at a few specific moments of interaction between the peoples who have come to make California home and the specific places in which they have interacted with each other. Of special interest will be imaginations of the Spanish missions, the Gold Rush, agricultural California, wilderness California, California as "sprawling multicultural dystopia," and California as "west of the west."
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3.00 Credits
This course explores the overlapping, intersecting, and intertwined experiences of distinct enthoracial communities in the United States. Students will investigate these experiences from a relational and connective point of view to tease out the contested meanings of nation, citizenship, community, rights, and struggle. For example, we will examine the 1947 school desegregation case involving Mexican Americans in California, Mendez v. Westminster, and its relationship to African American civil rights, Puerto Rican migration, and Japanese internment. Mendez v. Westminster, when approached from a connective perspective, reveals a multiracial and diasporic landscape that is more complex than previously considered. A connective approach to Race, Ethnicity, and Diaspora allows us to uncover important episodes of collaboration and tension that have been rendered invisible when studied independently. Working with ethnography, history, literature, critical essays, visual culture, and popular culture, this course focuses on the complicated bonds among multiracial constituencies and potential future forms of collaboration.
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3.00 Credits
In this class we will investigate the primary approaches to the study of popular expression and identity, with particular emphasis on Latina/o popular music as it relates to questions of gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and the nation. We will focus on the following questions, among others: How is Latina/o identity expressed through the "popular" or the everyday? In which ways does the study of Latina/o popular music and culture in general illuminate our understanding of the diverse Latina/o communities? How are we to interpret marketing phenomenon such as the Latin music "boom"? Employing a broad range of current Cultural Studies theories, methods, and core concepts, students will conduct an original semester-long research project and complete various ethnographic exercises in our analysis of the historical, socio-political, and artistic uses of popular music and culture among Latinas/os.
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3.00 Credits
The Spanish conquest of the Americas happened with astonishing rapidity: Christopher Columbus entered the Caribbean in 1492; Hernando Cortes completed the conquest of the Aztecs of central Mexico in 1521; Francisco Pizarro triumphantly entered the Inca capital Cuzco, in Peru, in 1533. Other conquistadors pushed north to the Carolinas and California, south to the Tierra del Fuego and the River Plate, and across the Amazon basin to the Atlantic. "We came," wrote the conquistador Bernal Dias del Castillo, "to serve God, and our King, and to get rich." Their deeds were legendary, the courage, daring, and endurance remarkable. They were also notoriously quarrelsome, greedy, and cruel. Before their onslaught the major civilizations of the New World crumbled--destroyed or changed beyond recognition. Rarely in history have so few conquered so many so quickly. The conquest of the New World has both excited and appalled the human imagination for more than five centuries. Many questions remain to be answered or are still capable of provoking controversy. Who exactly were the conquistadors? What motivated them? What meaning did they themselves assign to their actions? How could they justify their many misdeeds? How did they develop their sense of the Other? Why did resistance by indigenous peoples and regimes ultimately fail? Was the conquest somehow preordained? What mixture of human agency, culture, technology, religion, nature, and biology can best explain the results of this encounter between the conquistadors and the Amerindian worlds?
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3.00 Credits
Latina/o Studies independent study.
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3.00 Credits
Latina/o Studies independent study.
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3.00 Credits
Critics reading minority writing often focus on its thematic--i.e., sociological--content. Such literature is usually presumed to be inseparable from the "identity"/body of the writer and read as autobiographical, ethnographic, representational, exotic. At the other end of the spectrum, avant-garde writing is seen to concern itself "purely" with formal questions, divorced from the socio-historical (and certainly not sullied by the taint of race). In the critical realm we currently inhabit, in which "race" is opposed to the "avant-garde," an experimental minority writer can indeed seem an oxymoron. In this class we will closely read recent work by Asian American, African American, Native American and Latino/a writers which challenges preconceptions about ethnic literature, avant-garde writing, genre categorization, among other things. The writing done by these mostly young, mostly urban, poets and fiction writers is some of the most exciting being written in the United States today; their texts push the boundaries of aesthetic form while simultaneously engaging questions of culture, politics, and history. Reading them forces us to re-think our received notions about literature. Authors to be read include Will Alexander, Sherwin Bitsui, Monica de la Torre, Sesshu Foster, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Tan Lin, Tao Lin, Ed Roberson, James Thomas Stevens, Roberto Tejada, and Edwin Torres.
Prerequisite:
Those taking this as an English class must have previously taken a 100-level English course
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3.00 Credits
What is the relationship between real life in urban communities and the multiple ways in which they are imagined? What does it mean to be "urban," to live in an "urban community," or to be the product of an "urban environment"? Who do we think the people are who populate these spaces? This course takes a critical look at specific populations, periods, and problems that have come to dominate and characterize our conceptions of the quality, form, and function of U.S. urban life. A few of the topics we will cover include historical accounts of the varied ways in which poverty has been studied; race, class, and housing; the spatial practices of urban youth and the urban elderly; and gendered perspectives on social mobility and community activism. Finally, this course will explore how diverse social actors negotiate responses to their socio-spatial and economic circumstances, and, in the process, help envision and create different dimensions of the urban experience. The course fulfills the Exploring Diversity Initiative requirement as it explores how various forms of urban inequality affect the collective experience of social actors in diverse race and class categories. It focuses on the complex and contradictory ways in which urban residents confront, negotiate, and at times challenge social and structural inequalities and the changing political economy of U.S. cities.
Prerequisite:
Prior course(s) in American Studies, Latina/o Studies, or permission of instructor; not open to first year students
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3.00 Credits
How do we experience and represent time, and what factors might account for both our experiences and our representations? What are some of the ways that people experience and ritually mark the passing of time? What are some of the different ways that people have made sense of time and themselves in time? Especially for individuals and peoples who have been denied certain self-representation and narratives of place, how do competing notions of time, history, space, and location get negotiated? In this course, drawing from within the broad corpus of queer theory (including theorists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Mu?oz) we will examine some non-linear, non-normative, and interruptive approaches to making sense of time, space-time, and self within time. On the one hand, we will consider theorists who specifically question and challenge what Jose Esteban Mu?oz dubs the "linearity of straight time," and we will turn to a set of issues with regard to family and sexuality, especially critiques of normative lifecycle events and rituals that have reconfigured experiences and representations of time and place. On the other hand, we will also work with queer theory as it explores alternatives to normative conceptualizations of time and place that have already existed in the past. Hence we will look not only to queer theory as it reads more contemporary negotiations of sexuality, identity, time, and space-time; we will also consider how some contemporary theorists have read previous historical examples.
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