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AMERICAN STUDIES GRADUATE COURSE DESCRIPTIONS - SPRING 2012 509.001 Social Movements T 10:00 – 12:30 HUM 424 Goldstein This graduate seminar introduces students to the interdisciplinary study and critical theorization of social movements. Although the academic study of social movements has largely been the domain of the social sciences and social history, this course aims to broaden the spectrum of inquiry and analysis so as to examine and perhaps trouble prevailing assumptions of what and who constitutes a social movement. When the German sociologist Lorenz von Stein first introduced the term “social movement” in 1850 in a book on the French Revolution, he defined the term largely as the sustained, overarching process through which the working class acquired an awareness of itself as a unified class and gained political power. This definition has shifted considerably since, with studies of the diverse identity-based “new social movements” of the 1960s refocusing analysis on a wide array of groups and events. In this course, readings are intended to raise such questions as what forms of protest, antagonism, activism, organization, affiliation, and change does the notion of social movements accommodate and what does it omit? What conceptions of politics and the political are operative in various mobilizations and theorizations of social movement formation? What ideas about social collectivity and power, temporality and history, and the state and civil society are evident? Studying examples such as the Chicano movement, environmental justice initiatives, and Native Hawaiian anticolonial struggles, we will consider how and why specific conventions of liberalism, nationalism, heteronormativity, racialization, jurisprudence and rights have been reinforced, strategically utilized, contested, substantively transformed, or thoroughly rejected. Readings include texts by Maylei Blackwell, Daniel Martinez HoSang, Alondra Nelson, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Noenoe Silva, Andrea Smith, Dean Spade, Julie Sze, and Raúl Zibechi.
517.001 Politics of Visual Culture W 1:00 – 3:30 HUM 424 Schreiber This graduate seminar explores theories and methodologies employed by scholars of visual culture. In the past several decades, visual culture has emerged as a robust interdisciplinary field of study, encompassing subjects and strategies at home in the fields of American Studies as well as in film studies and art history. Our focus will be on the visual as an arena in which cultural meaning is constituted and power relations played out. Within this general framework, we will examine forms of visual culture from the late 19th century to the present, tracing the rise of mass media and image-based popular culture in the United States. The readings, for the most part, represent a combination of recent scholarship and now-canonical theoretical texts. They are organized thematically and focus on studies of photography, film, and material culture.
520.001 Politics of Property T 2:00 – 4:30 HUM 424 Correia In this class we will examine various ways of understanding property, from the liberal conception of property-as-freedom to the radical critique of property-as-theft. The seminar is designed as an interdisciplinary approach to the study critical legal studies in which the notion of property is recast as a set of power relations rather than as property-as-object.
523.001 Environmental Justic W 4:00 – 6:30 Correia In this seminar we will pursue a series of questions related to environmental justice. Why and through what social, political, and economic processes are environmental health risks distributed unequally? What are the social relations of production and power that contribute to these patterns? This course is designed as a multicultural/interdisciplinary approach to the study of environmental (in)justice that seeks to define the issue, theoretically and empirically, more broadly than understood in traditional academic work.
560.001 Critical Regionalism R 2:00 – 4:30 HUM 424 Meléndez The Southwest seems singularly immune to the drone of scholarly pronouncements that insist that regionalism, as an academic focus is passé if not an altogether a dead enterprise. Each year dozens of scholarly books on a range of subjects linked to the U.S. Southwest are published around the world. To those concerned with the nature of meta-narrative discourse, this apparent academic incongruence serves up a set of questions for scholars engaged in American Studies as currently theorized and practiced. A good part of this seminar will go to examining discourses – historical and contemporary – that inform the epistemology of this region. We will begin by asking a number of questions, some deceptively simple, others decidedly complex: How many discourses can a region have? Is a region the sum of its discourses? Why are there so many and such varied discourses on the Southwest? What are these discourses and how do they work? Do these discourses serve political, economic, cultural or social needs? What discursive space surrounds the various tropes that label this region: triculturalism, historic, utopic/dystopic, romantic, exotic, legendary, mythic, pre-modern/pre-capitalist, anarchic, arcadian, colonial/neo-colonial/post-colonial, local/global? What ideological and analytical frameworks explain the regular scholarly re-assessments of the Southwest that have fueled the creation of borderland studies, Southwest romanticism/orientalism, trans-border and transnational studies and critical regional studies?
Plausible answers to these questions rest on knowing the scholarly literature on this region. We will read for an understanding of how political containment and commercial pragmatism have served to legitimized preservationist movements, cultural appropriations, commodification of culture, ethnographic (mis)representation and the installation of hegemonic views of race, class, gender and ethnicity. We will have occasion to consider the European and American discoveries of the Southwest, the transformation of Southwestern sites into artist and tourist Meccas and the invention and maintenance of the US-Mexico border. We will study the effects of ethnic and cultural politics in matters of environmental racism, water rights, cultural and language rights, development, public art and museum representations.
Our reading of the following books will be supplemented by additional materials on reserve: Basso, K. Wisdom Sits in Places (New Mexico, 1996) Baker, E. On Strike and On Film (California, 2007) Brookes, Captives and Cousins (North Carolina, 2002) Flores, R. Remembering the Alamo (Texas, 2006) Kuletz, The Tainted Desert (Routledge,1998) Kosek, J. Understories (Duke, 2006) Montgomery, C. The Spanish Redemption (California, 2002) and Vila, P. Ethnography on the Border (Minnesota, 2003)
560.002 Borderlands Ethnography TR 3:30 – 4:45 Trujillo The borderlands and the US-Mexican border are central issues and metaphors in American Studies and the ethnography of the US Southwest. These concepts refer to both a political border etched into the landscape and, perhaps even more significantly, a metaphorical space of cultural and identity formation for "American," Chicana/o or Hispanic, and Native people. This course will examine both aspects of the border and will trace the development of border culture and border theory as concepts. Of particular interest will be the ways that these ideas have shaped and drawn into question the concepts of identity and alterity as well as specific ethnographic representations.
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