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AMERICAN STUDIES GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
- FALL 2013
510.001 Race, Culture & Cinema W 2:00 – 4:30 MITCH 115 Meléndez
Among its effects, cinema, both as celluloid/digital document and as social practice (authorship/spectatorship) appears to bring the past and that which is culturally distant closer to observers. Operating as a privileged locus, cinema makes patent the desire of modern audiences to zoom in on the markers of cultural difference (culture, language, ethnicity, gender, etc.) – particularly those of racialized others – and render them visibly comprehensible. In this seminar, I wish to draw attention to the dynamics that lie at the heart of the interface between race, culture and film spectatorship by first investigating how racialization and spectacle came to typify ethnographic, pseudo-scientific and technological experimentation at the dawn of early film. A second aim is to employ current scholarship on whiteness, modernity and social policing to investigate the resiliency of these early installations and their perpetuation even into the Modern. Our study will be moored on the wide berth of “ethnographic cinema,” a category Fatimah Rony defines as “the broad and variegated field of cinema which situates indigenous peoples in a displaced temporal realm.” One imperative in the seminar will be to account for cinema’s obsessions and anxieties about race as manifested in multiple film categories: “the film travelogue,” “ethnographic research films,” “colonial propaganda films,” “educational” and finally, entertainment films. Given the complex webs that tether “ethnographic cinema” to popular culture, to political economies and to the construction of nation and empire, students in this seminar will have occasion to read works tied to specific film practices along with theorists of “culture” and socially mediated meanings of visual representations (Barthes, Du Bois, Foucault, Hall, Lacan, Benjamin and others) in the effort to more precisely estimate when and how cinematic practices both bedevil and redeem the radicalized and “ethnographiable” subject.
510.002 Cultural Politics of Neoliberalism R 10:00 – 12:30 HUM 424 Goldstein
What cultural and political forces have underwritten the upward redistribution of wealth evident in the United States and throughout the world during the past forty years? Through what terms of popular consent has the martketization of social life dramatically accelerated and achieved the status of everyday common sense during this period? What are the conditions and consequences of the present crisis of neoliberalism?
One of the persistent fictions of neoliberalism—as with classical liberalism historically—has been the autonomy of economic, political, and cultural spheres. This course takes as its point of departure precisely the imbrication of the cultural, political, and economic dynamics shaped by and constitutive of the logics of neoliberalism. Rhetorical constructions of the “family” and “community” are particularly relevant in the privatized and ostensibly depoliticized discourses of neoliberalism. Likewise, rather than being brushed aside by the invisible hand of the new market society, the state remains a key arena for understanding the form and function of actually existing neoliberalism. As Karl Polanyi observed of nineteenth century liberalism, the regulatory operations and strategic capacities of the state were essential to the pursuit of laissez-faire economics. Examining the particular historical, social, political, and cultural dynamics of the neoliberal project, this course explores the ways in which economic life is always already entangled in the broader formations of politics and society.
This course will address the multiple dimensions of neoliberal formation and crisis, as well as how the terms of consent and contestation have shifted over the course of the past forty years. As historian Lisa Duggan has argued, “During every phase, the construction of neoliberal politics and policy in the U.S. has relied on identity and cultural politics. The politics of race, both overt and covert, have been particularly central to the entire project. But the politics of gender and sexuality have intersected with race and class at each stage as well.” Course readings will include texts by Paula Charkravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, Michel Foucault, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jodi Melamed, Lisa Marie Cacho, Soo Ah Kwon, and Arlene Dávila.
530.001 Feminist-Postcolonial-Queer R 2:00 – 4:30 HUM 422 Brandzel
This course examines the ways in which critical fields of study negotiate and fight over intersectional, complex subjectivities as objects and subjects of study. As critical ethnic studies, feminist studies, queer studies, and decolonial studies become increasingly established in academe, they demonstrate the ways in which the carving up of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and indigeneity into discrete areas of study works to create anti-intersectional analyses. Through this course we will interrogate how these fields come to name these objects and subjects of study, and how these maneuvers create “border wars” among these fields. Along the way, we will chart how identity and difference are constructed, managed and disciplined through notions of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism in university institutions. We will explore these themes through the fairly recent scholarship from Robyn Wiegman, Sara Ahmed, Rod Ferguson, Inderpal Grewal, Grace Hong, Lisa Marie Cacho, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Judith/Jack Halberstam, Alison Kafer, Scott Morgensen, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Rey Chow.
556.001 Critical Indigenous Studies M 2:00 – 4:30 HUM 424 Denetdale
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