Courses

Fall 2009

"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)

In this discussion-based and residential course, we will explore the hypothesis that 21st century racism has morphed from simple and evil formulations of bigotry and exploitation into more nefarious and decentralized systems of cultural camouflage, spatial demarcation, physical surveillance, and ideological control.
Our interdisciplinary and integrative approach will employ multiple methods of inquiry and expression, including: self-reflective essays and maps; a scavenger hunt in the Twin Cities; library research; and deep, critical analysis of arguments about race/ethnicity/assimilation/multiculturalism.
We will hone writing and speaking skills through highly structured assignments paired with open-ended conversations in order to discover the questions that truly matter to us. The semester will culminate with a short college-level paper directed toward the Clint Eastwood film, “Gran Torino.”

This course examines how sexuality, race, and nation relate in the lives of people in the United States, which we read in relation to histories of colonialism and globalization. Course material foreground scholarship, testimony, cultural work, and social movements by lgbt, two-spirit, same gender loving, and queer people of color, and by white LGBT and queer anti-racist allies. Their stories ofer a template through which all students may examine how everyday life is shaped by sexuality, race, and nation--both as power relations, and as spaces for creating new identity and action.

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.

 American Indian Studies/Native American Studies as a discipline has its beginnings in American Indian activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Since then, the discipline has emerged from various other disciplines such as history, anthropology, literary studies, and art and matured into a new interdisciplinary approach and epistemological framework. In this course we will examine what American Indian Studies scholar, Clara Sue Kidwell (Choctaw), describes as the “five premises” of the discipline of American Indian Studies: 1) The relationship between people and land, 2) the inclusion and privileging of American Indian historical perspectives, 3) the inherent rights of American Indians as sovereign nations, 4) the importance of language, and 5) the link between cultural values and contemporary forms of American Indian art and expression.

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.

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 280-01 Re-Envisioning Education and Democracy
TR 1:20-2:50 p.m. HUM 216
Professor Ruthanne Kurth-Schai
Cross-listed with EDUC 280-01 and POLI 211-01; first day attendance required

This course explores the design, implementation, and evaluation of public education policy as a primary means for engaging more active, inclusive and effective approaches to social inquiry and civic participation. Drawing from classic and contemporary theories of education and democracy, complemented by recent developments and controversies in public policy studies, students work to design innovative, principled, educationally sound and politically feasible responses to significant civic concerns. Spring semester.

2009 marks the 50th anniversary of statehood for Hawai`i. This anniversary, like the history of Hawai`i itself since the turn of the twentieth century, is highly contested. This course will introduce students to the history of Kanaka Maoli, indigenous Hawaiians, and the history of encounters between Americans, Hawaiians, and Asian migrants during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We will consider labor migration to the islands that profoundly altered their ethnic make-up and how, after American takeover, politics, race relations, and the status of Native Hawaiians, including laws about who counts as Native Hawaiian, have been shaped in a settler colony. We will also examine how and why Hawai`i became a state, the transformation of the islands from a plantation to a tourist economy, and how these changes affected residents based on their class, gender, ethnic group, and status as settlers or indigenous people.  

Afrofuturism is an artistic movement that uses science fiction and technoculture to address African-American concerns. In 2005, the Soap Factory, a local art space near the University of Minnesota, sponsored one of the first exhibits in then nation of Afro-futurist work, and HMCS was one of several co-sponsors of that event. The exhibit introduced our students to the critical and scholarly work of Yale sociologist Alondra Nelson, as well as the curatorial and artistic work of Black local and national artists whose work is displayed on the web and in art galleries, as well as in popular film, television and literature. That exhibit has since traveled to other locations, and Afrofuturism has taken off as a movement that engages scholars, critics and artists. In this course, we will explore some of the key works in the emerging Afro-futurist cannon, including Black science fiction in literature and on film and television, futuristic Black representations from the music world (e.g., Space is the Place by Sun Ra, and George Clinton's mothership connection), and the web design and video installation work of Cinque Hicks and others.

Hip Hop Performance is an interdisciplinary course on how hip hop culture informs contemporary theatrical practices in the United States. Students will read books and essays about the history of hip hop culture and about social, politiccal and aesthetic problems in hip hop representation. In addition, all members of the class will be required to participate in staging a hip hop theatrical performance.

The United States as a political formation, physical space, and cultural ideal has been shaped through its encounters with other nations. This course examines American civilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as government, commerce, foreign affairs, and domestic culture were wrought on a world stage through dialog as well as violent conflict at and well beyond its borders. We will examine the role of ideas about the frontier, manifest destiny, and American exceptionalism in the formation of the US; encounters with Indian nation; expansion westward and into the Pacific; immigration; the Spanish-American war; American commercial enterprise in Central America; the Cold War and American fascination with "the Orient"; and the symbiotic relationship between foreign affairs and domestic culture.

This innovative course will comprise a junior civic-engagement experience in the Twin Cities organized around a central theme (such as "Schools and Prisons"). The course provides a real-world urban context for students who are deeply engaged in theorizing racism and other forms of structural inequalities in the U.S. and around the globe. It is based largely outside the classroom, draws on the College's relationships with the Twin Cities, and provides extensive opportunities for students to interact with community mentors. The course is designed primarily for juniors majoring in American Studies as a prior rigorous study of issues related to race and racism in U.S. history and contemporary social policy and social thought are needed to set the stage for the course. It is required of all American Studies majors, however, other students with equivalent preparation are welcome with permission from the instructor. A 2-credit concurrent internship may be required for this course.
AMST 300-L1 Jr Civic Engagement Seminar Lab
TBA
Professor Karin San Juan

This advanced course explores two of the most important movements to challenge institutional racism in the second half of the 20th century—the U.S. civil rights movement and the South African anti-apartheid movement. The course places both of these movements within their specific historical contexts and, therefore, opens with an examination of the historical role(s) of racism in each of these societies. It then explores dimensions of these movements in a comparative fashion: the leadership produced by both movements; the functioning of both movements and the roles played by particular cohorts (women, young people, workers, allies); the internal tensions within each movement, particularly around ideologies, strategies, and tactics; the uses of culture (music, theater, poetry, visual art) within each movement. We also explore the methodologies of comparative history, particularly the critique that insists that the movements' influences on each other need to be considered. Finally, we assess the impact of each movement on its respective society.

This survey course will explore 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 analyzing current trends and future expectations in education.

AMST 350-01 American Pop, Rockability, and Soul, 1954-64
TR 3:00-4:30 MUSIC 202
Professor Mark Mazullo
Cross-listed with MUSI 350-01; First day attendance required

This course provides an in-depth look at one crucial period in American popular-music history, addressing in particular the roles that racial categories played in the production, dissemination, and reception of music in three dominant streams within the culture of American popular music. Topics for close study will include: Sam Philips’s practices of recording of black and white musicians for Sun Studios in Memphis during the 1950s; the early “crossover” hits of such recording artists as Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley; the doo wop repertory and theories of whiteness; issues of race, gender, and sexuality in the music of the “girl groups”; and a comparison of white-owned Stax Records and black-owned Motown in the early-mid 1960s. The course will move from a broad overview of the era at the beginning of the semester, through a discussion of conceptual, critical, and methodological issues, and into more detailed case studies of various recording artists, institutions, and repertories. The course aims to examine ways in which social and historical constructions of race operated on many levels, from the national industry (e.g., the Billboard charts), to regional and local scenes (e.g., the studio and “space/place” theory), to performative, technological, and aesthetic realms that intersect directly with issues of subjectivity and identity. This course is intended for upper-level majors and minors in Music and American Studies. It is designed as a seminar, and not a lecture course: students will be responsible for leading class on a regular basis, coming prepared with handouts and sets of questions/topics for discussion. Generally offered alternate years.

An examination of the social psychological factors associated with race prejudice and racism, particularly in the United States. Focusing on the psychological theories proposed to understand racism, this course investigates the causes and consequences of racism at the individual, interpersonal, institutional and cultural levels of society. Special attention will be given to exploring interventions to reduce racism. Culture and Context course. Prerequisites: Psychology 100, Psychology 201, and at least one intermediate course or permission of the instructor. Next offered in 2009-2010. (4 credits)

This course will explore African American cultural production during the twentieth century and, depending on the instructor, may focus on a particular genre (e.g., novels, short stories, drama, poetry, detective fiction, speculative fiction, film), or on a particular period (e.g., the Harlem Renaissance, the 1950s, the Black Arts Movement, the Contemporary), or on a particular theme (e.g., Afrian American Women's Writing, the Politics of Modern African American Literature), or on a particular author (e.g., Du Bois, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Brooks, Baldwin, Wideman, Morrison, Parks).

In this course, we will study the interdisciplinary field of contemporary U.S. Latino Studies that has emerged in response to this growing population in the United States. Here we will trace the fundamental questions and concerns within Latina/o Studies, ranging from the field's activist origins in the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements of the 1960s and 70s to its current emphasis on pan-Latino, comparative, and "new Latino" avenues of inquiry. For example, what is a U.S. Latina/o? What is U.S. Latina/o Studies, and how is it different from (and similar to) Latin American Studies? Where does U.S. Latina/o Studies "belong" in institutions of higher learning?  Finally, we will devote a significant portion of the course to a broader discussion of U.S. Latina/o identity as it relates to questions of class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and national origins.

AMST 494-01 Capstone Seminar: Blackness/Politics/Media
W 1:10-4:00 HUM401
Professor Leola Johnson
Cross-listed with HMCS 488-01