Courses

Fall 2008

"Education is a kind of continuing dialogue,
and a dialogue assumes,
in the nature of the case, different points of view"
Robert Hutchins (1899 - 1977)

AMST 100-01 Race/Class/Sex US Feminisms
3:00-4:30 pm, OLRI 241-- Professor Rachel Raimist
Cross-listed with WGSS 100-01; first day attendance required

This course frames key issues, questions, and debates in feminist theory across disciplines. Through analytical reading, writing, and discussion this course engages feminist scholarship to discuss history, identity, ability, colonialism, and nationalism. Central to the course will be a focus on the social construction of identity, and the many ways in which gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and nationality work to constitute experience. We will analyze sites of power, privilege, resistance, agency, and organizing in feminist work for social justice to develop understandings of gender as a tool to organize society based on difference and power. We will read scholarly texts, articles, view film and television programs, analyze media messages, explore websites, and popular culture to understand key ideas in U.S. feminisms.

AMST 103-01 Race in US Social Thought
TU/TR 1:20-2:50a, HUM 215-- Professor Duchess Harris
First Year Course only; first day attendance required

This course begins by exploring the political history of whiteness. Our point of departure will be David R. Roediger's newest text (2005), "Working Toward Whiteness, How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs." We will examine how "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation. We will interrogate Roediger's question, "What happens when we think of assimilation as Whitening as well as Americanizing" (pp 9-10). In other words, to become American one must "fight to be White." The core of this course will focus on post-1960 America and the Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow Power Movements. We will use autobiography and prison writings to examine the Black Power Movement; the American Indian Movement; Latino Militancy, and Asian American insurgency. We will end the course with an analysis of conservative people of color and their counterparts in the dominant culture, and their movement to resist identity politics in the 1990s and the turn of the 21st Century.

AMST 194-02 Race and Sound in Modern American Culture
T-Th 3:00 – 4:30 HUM 215
Professor Dan Gilbert

This course examines the racial politics of music making and noise production in the twentieth century. Drawing on recent scholarship on sound from a range of disciplinary perspectives, we will develop a shared critical vocabulary for interrogating the ways in which race has been voiced in the ‘soundscape of modernity,’ to borrow Emily Thompson’s phrase. Key topics include the place of song and noise-making in social movements, the politics of ‘noise-pollution,’ the racialized history of the music industry, and the racialized and gendered history of communications work.

AMST 194-03 American Voices
MWF 12:00-1:00 PM Old Main 010
Professor Michael Cohen
Cross-listed with ENGL 130-01

This introductory English course situates contemporary American writers of color in the diasporic and transnational contexts their work both registers and invokes. We will complicate our assumptions about the "American-ness" of American literature by acknowledging the multiple communities – national, regional, racial, sexual, religious, economic, and/or political – to which "American" writers imagine themselves (or are imagined) as belonging, and for which they write. Readings will include fiction, drama, poetry, and prose.

AMST 200-01 Critical Methods for American Studies Research
M 7-10 HUM 112
Professor Jane Rhodes
First day attendance required

What constitute research in American Studies and Ethnic Studies? This course will introduce students to the critical and intellectual underpinnings of research approaches in interdisciplinary scholarship. Fields like American Studies were founded, in part, to critique the canons and assumptions embedded in the disciplines. American Studies and Ethnic Studies scholars also insist that race, ethnicity, gender, class, and other categories of difference be in the forefront of the research agenda, and that researchers be cognizant of the role difference plays for the researcher, the subject under scrutiny, and the results. This course will consider these factors as you get hands-on experience with historical, field research and cultural studies approaches to scholarship. The interdisciplinary selection of readings will include Ethnography at the Border, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity, and Silencing the Past.

AMST 233-01 Introduction to the History of the U.S. Working Class
MWF 2:20 – 3:20 pm Old Main 002
Professor Peter Rachleff
Cross-listed with HIST 233-01

This course traces the development of the U.S. working class—men and women, native-born and immigrants, black and white—from the artisan era to the post-industrial age. This course is designed primarily for students who have no previous college-level background in U.S. history. Alternate years. (4 credits)

AMST 240-01 Race/Culture/Ethnicity in Education
M 7-10 HUM 215
Professor Marceline DuBose
Cross-listed with EDUC 240-01, First day attendance required

This course will look at history, policy, and pedagogy as they relate to race, ethnicity, and culture as education. K-12 public education will be the primary focus with topics including desegregation, standardized testing, multi-cultural and ethnocentric pedagogy, the teacher’s role and experience, and significant historical events in education. The course will culminate by looking at current trends and future expectations in education.

AMST 250-01 Race, Place and Space
MWF 2:20-3:20 HUM 215
Professor Karin Aguilar-San Juan
Cross-listed with GEOG 250-01; first day attendance required

How do U.S. racial categories become grounded in place and space? In this seminar, we will examine race at various levels of spatial scale: from the racialization of the U.S. nation-state to U.S. cities and suburbs; and from prisons, reservations, and ethnic enclaves to the human body. As a point of departure, we will look for and analyze race and related social categories in places around the Twin Cities. By putting familiar ideas about race and ethnicity in a sociospatial framework, we will develop a specialized vocabulary for explaining how race, place, and space are connected. This course requires prior exposure to at least one of the following areas: American Studies, human geography, sociology of race/ethnicity, or urban studies.

AMST 294-01 African Americans in the West
T-Th 3:00-4:30 AM Old Main 001
Professor Lynn Hudson
Cross-listed with HIST 294-01

The study of African American history has often been restricted to the study of the U.S. south. Yet segregation, the civil rights movement, and the Great Migration are all central aspects of black history that also took shape west of the Mississippi River. What happens, for example, when scores of black southerners abandon the Jim Crow south and head west to Kansas in the nineteenth century? What did segregation look like in Texas, Arizona, and California? This course considers these questions and others by examining a range of primary and secondary sources including the autobiography of Nat Love, a black cowboy, the recordings of jazz artists who performed on Central Avenue, the “black main street” of Los Angeles, and studies of all-black towns in the west.

AMST 294-02 Transatlantic Slave Trade
T-Th 9:40-11:10 AM Old Main 001
Professor Lynn Hudson
Cross-listed with HIST 256-01

This class examines the Atlantic commerce in slaves that occurred between approximately 1400 and 1800. Among the topics we will consider are the social cost to Africa of this forced migration; the role of gender in the trade; the economic and social development of slave societies; resistance to the slave trade; and the abolitionist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition to reading recent historiography, students will analyze a range of primary source material including but not limited to diaries of fugitive slaves and slave traders, and documents from the abolitionist movement.

AMST 294-03 Ethnicity and Race
MWF 10:50-11:50 AM HUM 215
Professor Naran Bilik

AMST 394-01 US Racial Formations and the Global Economy
MWF 1:10 pm-2:10 pm HUM 215--Professor Karin San Juan
First day attendance required

US Racial Formations and the Global Economy develops an understanding of race in the United States as a complex and contradictory social category that has been shaped and organized by the historical expansion and ongoing crisis of the global capitalist economy. As the global economy reshapes the world, racial formations in the United States transform, but they do not disappear. What freedoms are ensured in a global free market? How have the opportunities of the Global North been shaped by the hardships of the Global South? What are the alternatives to the globalization of poverty? Can globalization work under democratic and/or socialist regimes? The course will provide one of the options for fulfilling the US Multiculturalism requirement for graduation, and it may also serve as one of the American Studies Department options for completion of the Certificate in Global Citizenship. The course will be open to sophomores and others who have taken the AMST introductory
courses or their equivalent.

AMST 394-02 Church and State: Religion and the Founding
MWF 1:10-2:10 pm Old Main 111
Professor Andrea Cremer
Cross-listed with HIST 394-01

This course traces the influences of religion on the development of early American society and cultural identities. Beginning with an examination of the diverse religious and spiritual forces at work in the American colonies, this course follows the development of religious and intellectual movements in the late colonial, Revolutionary and Early Republican eras. Key sites of investigation will include: orthodoxy and dissent, religion and political power, the "founders" and personal faith, religion and reform, religion from the underside (the politics of gender and race). Through the examination of primary documents and historical monographs, students will analyze the relevance of early American religion to current debates about the role of religion in political culture and governmental authority. The course approaches religion not as an esoteric site of intellectual inquiry, but instead as a perpetual, insistent, and multi-faceted feature of American political and social systems.

AMST 394-03 Asian American Poets
MWF 10:50 – 11:50 PM Olin Rice 300
Professor Kristin Naca
Cross-listed with ENGL 394

In their poems, Asian American poets theorize the project of America, as much as what it means to be Asian: to live under the weight of distinctive racial tensions and violence, to negotiate diasporic spaces, and to find communities that provide cultural legibility. We take a historical approach to Asian American poetry, reading work from the nineteenth century to the present. This includes poetries of internment, post-civil rights era, and the avant-garde from modernism to the contemporary. We also take a poet's approach, reading poems from the inside out: tone, syllable, line, sentence, stanza. We untangle spirit, the utter, utter, as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha writes. We practice sensitive articulation as a form of poetic reciprocity in discussion and in writing. To do this, we write in multiple genres: prose, poetry, fragments, to name a few. We engage our political sensibilities in a term anthology project, in which students practice the role of poet-pedagogue. Assignments include: regular study questions, short poetics papers, poems, and term project. Individual poets of interest will include: Jose Garcia Villa, Mei Mei Berssengbrugge, Linh Dinh, John Yau, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.

AMST 400-01 Senior Seminar: Transition to Life After Mac
Wednesday 7:00 – 10:00 PM Humanities 215
Professor Duchess Harris

The senior capstone is required of all majors. Majors who meet college criteria are encouraged to conduct an honors project in conjunction with their Senior Capstone (4 Credits). The purpose of this course is to give you practical skills that will launch you into the next phase of your life. The readings for this course were carefully selected to prepare you for graduate school in this discipline. If you do not choose American Studies as a career path, the textual analysis that you do in this course will be useful in many other fields. You will be responsible for leading class discussion

AMST 494-01 Advanced Seminar: Whiteness and the Media
W 1:00-4:10 HUM 402
Professor Leola Johnson
Cross-listed with HMCS 494-01

For most of the past decade, the burgeoning literature on race, racism, and the media has focused on the "Other," that is, on representations of Blacks, Latinas/os, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in journalism and in commercial culture generally. This capstone seminar offers advanced experience in an increasingly important but still inadequately investigated area of racism and the media, study of the unmarked category of race, in representations and understandings of Whites and Whiteness. This reorientation makes visible what has long been invisible, namely that White identity is also "raced" in its representation–and has a history and politics. We trace the development of the category of Whiteness in the European colonial project and study its function in the racism of the Southern United States as well as in Northern cities, where different immigrant groups negotiated an uneasy relation with dominant White culture. Then we look at the survival of White discourses in neo- and post-colonial environments, where they flourish, generally invisibly, long after the original colonial projects that spawned them have been overthrown or exhausted. We look at the survival of these discourses in films, clothing styles, and the audiences and texts of television. And we consider alternative forms of representation that challenge the privileged vantage point of what Stuart Hall has called the "whites of their eyes."