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Course Criteria
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3.00 Credits
What is the meaning of identity in a transnational space straddling the United States and the Caribbean? Migration, settlement and return are central to the historical experiences and the literary and aesthetic expressions of Caribbean societies. This course combines literary and anthropological perspectives to the study of novels and historical and anthropological texts in which themes of migration, immigration and transnationalism play central roles.
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2.00 Credits
Mestisaje (racial-cultural blending) is a foundational paradigm for understanding Latino history, culture and politics. The course Mestizo Stories provides students a wide-ranging, inter-discipline introduction to the subject of mestisaje. Jose Vasconcelor's influential book La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Races) will be the conceptual anchor for analysis and interpretation. The book will be augmented by films, videos, recordings and assigned readings exploring three core areas of concerns: 1) The historical origins of mestizo/a identity and cultural production; 2) The experience and narratives of mestisaje in the United States; and 3) The global implications of mestisaje as a transcendent social and cultural manifestation. Students are expected to be critical readers of the assigned texts, which will be primarily in English though some will be in Spanish or bi-lingual. Active participation in class discussions is also essential. Students are also expected to present a PowerPoint presentation on a selected aspect of mestisaje from a wide range of humanities and social science topics to be investigated. The oral-visual presentation will become the basis for a written research paper. Mestizo Stories will explore visual, musical, literary and performative texts of human agency, resistance and survival.
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3.00 Credits
Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, iPhones, Lady GaGa, and cellphones? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.
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3.00 Credits
No course description available.
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3.00 Credits
This course offers a survey of black diasporic artistry. At the same time, it is an ongoing analysis of how these artists asked, "what constitutes the African diaspora" in divergent and convergent ways. The main goal of the course is to not simply to label certain artists as part of this diasporic formation, but to understand how artists reflected upon their participation in it (and, in some ways, outside of it). We will focus primarily on this conversation's development from the interwar period of the twentieth-century to the turn of the twenty-first century through poetry, prose fiction and nonfiction, film, television, and dance. From the United States, we will look at how creative intellectuals like the poet Langston Hughes, dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, fiction writer and essayist Richard Wright, and journalist Alex Haley used art to understand their relationship to black peoples in the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, along with key events impacting those different geographies. But the course will also consider how black creative intellectuals outside the United States reflected on their relationship to the diaspora. These will include Algerian philosopher Frantz Fanon, Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, and Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Derek Walcott. In exploring different conceptions of diaspora, we will encounter other themes including the idea of overlapping diasporas, black nationalism, the body, and the significance of translation to cultural solidarity and difference.
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3.00 Credits
This course offers a survey of black diasporic artistry. At the same time, it is an ongoing analysis of how these artists asked, "what constitutes the African diaspora" in divergent and convergent ways. The main goal of the course is to not simply to label certain artists as part of this diasporic formation, but to understand how artists reflected upon their participation in it (and, in some ways, outside of it). We will focus primarily on this conversation's development from the interwar period of the twentieth-century to the turn of the twenty-first century through poetry, prose fiction and nonfiction, film, television, and dance. From the United States, we will look at how creative intellectuals like the poet Langston Hughes, dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, fiction writer and essayist Richard Wright, and journalist Alex Haley used art to understand their relationship to black peoples in the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa, along with key events impacting those different geographies. But the course will also consider how black creative intellectuals outside the United States reflected on their relationship to the diaspora. These will include Algerian philosopher Frantz Fanon, Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, and Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Derek Walcott. In exploring different conceptions of diaspora, we will encounter other themes including the idea of overlapping diasporas, black nationalism, the body, and the significance of translation to cultural solidarity and difference.
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3.00 Credits
For many Americans, the history of slavery is synonymous with plantations in the Atlantic world. This course seeks to expand our view of Atlantic slavery by looking to the Ancient World, Africa, Asia and Europe in historic and contemporary contexts. This course examines slavery as a labor system and a social form intimately connected with the political economies and cultural groups within which it arose. It will also examine debates about contemporary forms of bonded labor and slavery emerging from global encounters today. By examining different types of bonded and unfree labor, such as chattel, domestic, and wage slavery, we will form an inquiry about slavery's relationship to the following: person-hood and social death; the emergence of market economies; systems of differentiation used to maintain the social condition of the enslaved; and power and violence. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach relying on archaeology, anthropology and history for our case studies in understanding this particular social form.
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3.00 Credits
This course analyzes contemporary patterns of globalization drawing on recent ethnographies. We will briefly overview the historical antecedents of globalization, and then proceed to analyze globalization's cultural, socio-political, and economic complexity, often resulting in urbanization. In particular, we will tackle the global circulation of food, entertainment, fashion, capital, ideologies, violence, religious practice, migrant/trafficked labor, and even of so-called "anti-globalization" movements. Examples of specific topics include youth and free trade in Latin America; cyber-politics among transnational Chinese, Eritreans, and others; McDonald's and consumerism in Moscow, and Indian cinema and global media. By locating global processes in everyday practice, we will come to understand the interconnectivity sustaining globalization, and the resulting practices of resistance. More broadly, we will appreciate on the one hand how various cultures and societies become increasingly interconnected, and on the other how people around the world appropriate large-scale processes in culturally specific ways. The course emphasizes anthropology's role as a discipline that is globally relevant and publicly engaged. Accordingly, we will focus on the discipline's methodological and theoretical contributions in the study of globalization and its inequalities, and toward a more socially-just world. The course will also equip you to design and implement an original research project, and to write an ethnographic account based on such project.
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3.00 Credits
This course deals with archaeological data and cultural life of prehistoric western North Americans over the last 20,000 years, until contact with European cultures. The course emphasizes origins and cultural development from an early pioneer stage to the later, sophisticated and diverse cultures of the Native Americans. The course will focus on material culture, environmental relationships, and technology to explore cultural change, land-use patterns, economics, and political complexity. In addition, some understanding of the methods by which archaeology is done by scientists in North America and an introduction to historical archaeology are included.
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3.00 Credits
As the brouhaha over Howard Dean's "yell" illustrates, media have come to play a key role in the coverage of presidential elections. This course examines how print and broadcast media have functioned in U.S. elections since the way we choose a president was first established. After a brief overview of changing relationships between journalists and presidential candidates in the 19th century, we will focus on elections since the 1920s, when radio first broadcast election updates. We will analyze how candidates have used radio, television, and the Internet to construct images of themselves and their platforms, and how journalists have become an active force in representing the political process. Rather than see electronic media as neutral or objective, we will assess the narrative strategies and visual and verbal codes by which media present politics to us, the voters.
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