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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
The dispersal of Africans to various parts of the world and over time, examining their experiences and those of their descendants. Regions of special interest include the Americas and the Islamic world, centering on questions of slavery and freedom while emphasizing the emergence of cultural forms and their relationship to both African and non-African influences.
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4.00 Credits
No course description available.
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4.00 Credits
The indigenous people of Australia have long been the subject of interest and imagination by outsiders for their cultural formulations of kinship, ritual, art, gender, and politics, and they have entered into representations as distinctively "other"-whether in negative or positive formulations of the "primitive." These representations-in feature films about them such as Walkabout and Rabbit-Proof Fence, in New Age literature, or in museum exhibitions-are now also in dialogue with their own forms of cultural production. At the same time, Aboriginal people have struggled to reproduce themselves and their traditions in their own terms, asserting their right to forms of cultural autonomy and self-determination. We explore the historical and geographical range of Aboriginal Australian forms of social being through ethnographic texts, art, novels, autobiographies, film, and other media, and consider the ways in which identity is being challenged and constructed.
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4.00 Credits
Despite its small size and population, Israel is a diverse, dynamic, and complex society. To understand its ethnic, religious, and political divisions, the different ethnic origins of the Jewish population over the last 150 years are examined, and the growing role of the Arab population (approaching 20 percent) in Israeli society is discussed. The special role of religion in the secular state, the development of Hebrewspeaking culture, the political system, the settlement movement and the peace movement, gender issues, Foundations of Contemporary Culture and the role of the army in everyday life are all addressed, concluding with a survey of the debate on whether Israel is a Jewish state or a state of all its citizens. Although the controversial issues that keep Israel in the headlines are touched on, the focus is on the character of Israeli society and the impact on everyday life of living in the international limelight.
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4.00 Credits
Major issues in the historical and contemporary experiences of Asian Pacific Americans, including migration, modernization, racial formation, community-building, and political mobilization. Asian Pacific America encompasses a complex, diverse, and rapidly changing population of people. Particular attention is given to Asian Americans' use of cultural productions (films, literature, art, media, and popular culture) as an expression and reflection of their cultural identities, historical conditions, and political efforts.
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4.00 Credits
What was America before it was called America? How did indigenous cultures understand and document their first encounters with Europeans? We focus on peoples, events, and cultural expressions associated with the conquest and colonization of the Americas, concentrating on three key areas: central Mexico, home to several pre-Columbian societies, most notably the Aztec Empire, and later the seat of Spanish power in northern Latin America (the Viceroyalty of New Spain); the central Andes, home of the Incas and later the site of Spanish power in southern Latin America (the Viceroyalty of Peru); and finally, early plantation societies of the Caribbean, where the violent history of enslaved Africans in the new world unfolded. On one hand, we explore how those subjugated by conquest and colonialism interpreted, resisted, and recorded their experience. On the other, we ask what new cultural forms emerged from these violent encounters, and consider their role in the foundation of "Latin American" cultures. Readings balance a range of primary documents and art created during the "age of encounter," including maps, letters, paintings, and testimonials, along with historical and theoretical texts.
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4.00 Credits
The archaeology, literature, and art of ancient Egypt all offer insights into its culture. Subjects of special interest are ancient Egyptian religious experiences and ethics, as well as constructions of gender, class, and ethnicity. Settlements that are particularly well documented through both archaeological and textual remains-such as Kahun and Deir el-Medina-yield extensive information about the varieties of social experience in these societies. Lives differed tremendously based on gender, profession, and locality (both spatial and temporal). Likewise, we explore how Egyptians, regardless of social standing, attempted to alter their socio-political circumstances through avenues such as concerted political action, magic, revolt, or the construction of well-crafted satire. Primary sources include letters, wisdom literature, love poetry, ancient house plans, tomb scenes, and physical anthropology.
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4.00 Credits
Explores the expansive transformation of Asian cultures from ancient times to the present, focusing on networks of mobility, interaction, social order, and exchange that form the particularity of Asian cultures through entanglements with others. Beginning in the days of Alexander the Great and the formation of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene, follows the tracks of Buddhist, Confucian, Hindu, and Muslim expansion and then turns to the age of early modern landed empires, Ottoman-Safavid- Mughal-Ming/Ching, and their interactions with seaborne European expansion. Studies truly global formations of culture in the flow of goods, ideas, and people among world regions, during the age of modern empires and nationalism, including the rise of the nation as a cultural norm, capitalism in Asia, and Japanese expansion around the Pacific Rim. Concludes by considering cultural change attending globalization since the 1950s, focusing on entanglements of Asian cultures with the globalizing culture of the market, consumerism, and wage labor, and transnational labor migration, as well as Asian cultural spaces in and around New York City, including our nearby Chinatown.
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4.00 Credits
The idea of "America" has long been dissected and reconstituted by a number of ideologues, theorists, policymakers, artists, activists, and ordinary people. Each has sought to craft a new existence that distinguished itself from "Old World" tyranny and tensions, significantly through the creation of imagined communities of identity and belonging, based Foundations of Contemporary Culture on various cultural, political-economic, and social criteria. We focus on studies of selected communities (e.g., the concept and experience of race in Brazil, homophobia in the West Indies) and historical events (e.g., 19th- and 20th-century migrations of Asians to Central America) and explore how global visions and international movements as, for example, Negritude, Pan-Americanism, Pan-Africanism, cosmopolitanism, and mestizaje/créolité emerge from local currents and practices.
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4.00 Credits
The "long nineteenth century," from the 1820s through the 1920s, saw the arrival of no fewer than 50 million immigrants to the United States. Coming primarily, although not exclusively, from Europe, their migrations not only transformed the places they left, but profoundly altered American society. These migrations, all of which involved a high degree of choice on the part of their participants, took place within the context of family and communal decision making, which in turn impacted significantly on the women and men who made these journeys, allowing- or forcing-them to create new kinds of identities, institutions, and cultures. Indeed, as a result of their migrations, they became new people. They became "ethnic," as they had to redefine themselves both in terms of what they left, what they "brought" with them, and what they encountered in America. We explore how their journeys led to the creation of a set of ethnic communities in America, which we can see as specific and unique and yet resembling each other in notable ways, focusing on three seemingly very different 19th-century groups: Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, and the ethnic cultures they created.
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