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Course Criteria
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1.00 Credits
Why does colonialism matter to the fields of Latin American studies and American studies? What have been the consequences of colonialism for the nations that make up the Western Hemisphere? What have been the effects of colonial processes that have happened elsewhere but have clearly had an impact on the rise of nation-states and on racial formation in postslavery societies? What does it mean to put slavery and freedom at the center of national histories, even for those nations (postcolonial or indigenous) that are not typically associated with slavery? Beginning with 1898, this course analyzes cultural production over time and offers a comparison of the political legacies (as well as the contemporary cultural traces) of the original colonial enterprise.
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1.00 Credits
This junior colloquium offers an introduction to several key critical issues and debates concerning the representation of race in American culture. In addition to reading several accounts and critiques of how racial minorities have been represented by the dominant culture, we will also consider how racial subjects have theorized ways of representing themselves in response to the burden of such stereotyping and objectification. The course is organized around two case studies. The first of these will focus on one of American culture's "primal scenes" of racial representation: blackface minstrelsy. Considering a variety of critical, literary, and visual texts, we will examine how African American images and culture became a way for working-class and other whites to negotiate their own identities, and how African American artists and intellectuals have responded to this troubling legacy. In the second half of the course, we will turn our attention to questions of cultural representation that originate from the racial context often deemed to be the opposite of the African American experience: that of Asian Americans. If African Americans have long been the target of overtly negative stereotypes, Asian Americans have been subjected to what one critic has called "racist love"--that is, a tradition of putatively positive stereotypes that have produced a different set of representational problems for Asian Americans. Together, these case studies will allow us to explore a wide range of models for thinking and writing about race in American culture.
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1.00 Credits
In this course students will study the history and theory of historic preservation and gain practical experience in site assessment and historical analysis. How do we determine historic significance? Who are the stewards of historic spaces? What are effective strategies for preservation planning and policy making? How do artifacts and structures inform our understanding of local history? Students will pursue fieldwork at local sites such as the Washington Street burying ground. The major assignment will be a preservation assessment study of a building or site on Wesleyan campus or in Middletown.
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1.00 Credits
This junior colloquium examines the shifting definitions and uses of "citizenship" and "sovereignty" in the United States. Both terms are understood broadly so that citizenship, for example, encompasses not only U.S. citizenship, but also belonging in relationship to ethnic, racial, gender, and class groups. The chronological span of the course runs from the late 18th century to the turn of the 21st century. We will focus on claims of various groups--women, immigrants, blacks, and Native Americans--to citizenship, and on contestations over sovereignty and the extent of sovereign power through explorations of the Revolutionary era, contention that sovereignty rested within "the people," the separation of church and state, the relationship between state and federal powers, and the sovereignty of tribal nations. In particular, the course will investigate political arguments over sovereignty voiced during the founding of the United States, the nullification crisis, the Civil War and slave emancipation, the Cold War, and the advent of Native American casinos. It will also analyze the relationship between citizenship and social movements like women's suffrage, second-wave feminism, the Civil Rights movement, and gay rights. The course contends that, ironically, it was Revolutionary political and ideological rhetoric focused on freedom, equality, and independence that set the stage for ongoing social and political turmoil over citizenship and sovereignty.
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1.00 Credits
Together we will consider how literature can advance American studies as an interdisciplinary critical and self-critical project. Literature--like life, and like American studies--is not divided into disciplines. Indeed, literature functioned as a form of "American studies" long before American studies took shape as a field in the 1930s. Literature investigated some areas of American experience well before historians recognized and researched these areas as "history" and focused on key theoretical concerns well before theorists formulated and abstracted these concerns as "theory." We will read a variety of literary forms: novels (Twain, Adams), stories (Hawthorne, Hughes, Cheever), plays (Glaspell, Odets, Gold Kopit), essays (Emerson, London), literary cultural criticism (Eastman, Du Bois), utopian fiction (Bellamy), memoirs (Cabeza de Vaca). And we will reflect on writing by some key critics (Trilling, Bercovitch) and theorists (Marx, Williams, Eagleton, Bourdieu, Butler). Our goal is to reassess how literature can help us develop as creative American studies thinkers.
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1.00 Credits
This course introduces students to concepts, theories, and methods of cultural anthropology. Lectures, readings, and audiovisual materials invite critical analysis of broader themes in contemporary anthropology, such as the nature of culture, the problematic notions of social evolution and progress, and the negotiation of power within and among diverse peoples.
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1.00 Credits
Paleoanthropology is the study of human origins, of how we evolved from our apelike ancestors into our modern form with our modern capabilities. Drawing on both biological anthropology (the study of fossils, living primates, human variation) and archaeology (the study of material culture, such as tools, art, food remains), the course will examine what we know about our own evolutionary past and how we know it. The history of paleoanthropology--how our views of our past have changed--will also be explored.
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1.00 Credits
This course covers the archaeology of approximately the last 500 years in the Americas. By its very nature, historical archaeology deals with material remains from periods for which historical information also exists. In this course, we will focus on understanding how material remains can be used as a rich source of history in and of themselves and how archaeological data can also be blended with historical sources to produce rich interdisciplinary narratives of the past. The period covered by historical archaeology in the Americas has been a time of upheaval, most notably from settler colonialism, the forced diaspora of enslaved Africans to work on plantations, and from the move into industrialization that changed conditions of life and labor for many. We will address all of these changes, paying particular attention to how archaeology informs our understanding of resistance and hybridity in colonial contexts, the contribution of archaeology to understanding processes of racialization, and the commitment of historical archaeologists to furthering social justice in the present through their work on the past. Sites studied will include those relating to Spanish settlement in California and the Caribbean; Native sites that intersected with periods of settler colonialism; British plantations in the Chesapeake; domestic sites of enslaved Africans and free black communities; industrializing cities, including New York City and Lowell, MA; mining settlements in the American West; overseas Chinese communities in California; sites of institutional confinement; and brothels in 19th-century cities. Our study of these sites will focus on social interpretations of ethnic, racialized, gender, sexual, and class identities. The course will also introduce students to archaeology through a day-trip to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and via a hands-on lab session in the Cross Street Archaeology Lab.
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1.00 Credits
This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of urban anthropology. The first part of the course is a theoretical examination of "the modern city" and of contemporary global urban trends, such as the explosion of cities into megalopolises. Attention is placed on new intellectual challenges these trends present to us in our attempts to think and write about urban space and metropolitan life today. Readings on urbanism and urbanization, the production of space and place, and transnationalism include perspectives from Marxism, the avant garde, feminism, poststructuralism, and globalization theory. The second part of the course focuses on the study of cities as they are experienced, imagined, and made every day by those who live in them. We consider how cities become foremost spaces for the exercise and contestation of power, for social cohabitation and conflict, for cultural creation and repression. Themes include class and racialization; public and "sacred" spaces; "informality" and its cultures; carnivals and parades; crime and policing; and storytelling in the city.
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1.00 Credits
This course investigates the historical development of commodity production and its global expansion since the early modern period. This process can be interrogated from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and through both global and local lenses. This course opens up a conversation between a historical archaeologist and a cultural anthropologist on commodity consumption as a material, social, and cultural process; in so doing we will contrast archaeological and ethnographic approaches. Among the questions we will address are, What makes a thing a commodity, and how did commodity production develop as the dominant form of production and lead to a culture of mass consumption? How have social relations both shaped and been shaped by commodities? How has the proliferation of new spaces of consumption, from markets, to department stores, to Internet shopping, figured into this process? Are there significant differences between the marketing of material and symbolic goods? Throughout, we will emphasize the creative agency of consumers and the continual transformation of things, whether those things were acquired in domestic or global markets. Examples will be drawn from the early modern period to the present.
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