Course Information
Course Schedules
Course Descriptions Spring 2010
Course: AMS 500
Instructor: Donald Grinde
Title: U.S. Indian Policies Since 1871
Day: Tuesday
Time: 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Location: Clemens 1004
Reg. #: 257714
Description:
This course will begin in 1871, the end of the Treaty-Making Period and the point in time perhaps, that the United States emerges as a colonial power. The history of the relationship between the United States Government and the American Indian Tribes from the year 1871 to present will be examined phase by phase: however, as we progress during the semester, special treatment will be given to certain topical areas, such as: Termination, Sovereignty, Urbanization, Federal State-Tribal Conflicts, Political Action (Alcatraz, Trail of Broken Treaties and Wounded Knee), energy development, etc. In addition, we will explore the position and role of American Indians during the last twenty years of the 20th Century.
Course: AMS 500
Instructor: Theresa Runstedtler
Title: Cultures of U.S. Empire
Day: Thursday
Time: 3:00 p.m. - 5:50 p.m.
Location: Clemens 1004
Reg. #: 092873
Description:
"One of the central themes of American historiography is that there is no American Empire. Most historians will admit, if pressed, that the United States once had an empire. They promptly insist that it was given away. But they also speak persistently of America as a World Power." – William Appleman Williams, 1955
Covering from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, this graduate reading seminar examines interdisciplinary approaches to the study of “culture” in relations between, within, and among the United States and other nations. In doing so, it introduces students to the wide-ranging body of transnational scholarship that challenges prevailing ideas of U.S. exceptionalism.
This course takes an inclusive view of culture. Students will read texts that analyze a variety of cultural artifacts including photographs, popular literature, touring shows, music, movies, and the World’s Fairs. Focusing on culture not only illuminates the important realm of foreign relations beyond the limited sphere of the state and diplomacy, but also helps to dispel the enduring myth that the United States is not an imperial (or at least imperial-minded) nation. Moreover, exploring cultural discourses allows us to gain a better understanding of the perpetration of imperial acts – the various means by which they became publicly acceptable and ultimately erased from popular memory.
In addition to historical content, course discussions and papers will focus on comparing methods, theoretical models, research techniques, and the art of writing history. Some of the major topics will include internationalism and transnationalism; imperialism and postcolonialism; the Black Atlantic, borderlands, and frontiers; Americanization and globalization; race, gender, class, and the nation; and mass culture, late capitalism, and postmodernism. In particular, we will explore the contributions various disciplines (anthropology, sociology, literary critique, etc.) can make to transnational histories and how historical research can contribute to the development of theory and method across disciplinary fields. We will also interrogate the rise of transnational histor y within the context of contemporary global conditions, determining what is “new” and not so new about the current period’s focus on “globalization.”
Possible Texts:
Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2002)
Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (2002)
Laur a Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in the Age of U.S. Imperialism (2000)
Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (2004)
Paul Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006)
Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000)
Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (2005)
Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003)
Harvey Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (2007)
Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (2003)
Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (1999)
Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (2006)
Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (2004)
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945 (2001)
Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (2005)
Course: AMS 500
Instructor: Camilo Trumper
Title: Memory, State Violence and Human Rights in Latin America
Day: Thursday
Time: 6:00 p.m. – 8:50 p.m.
Location: Clemens 1004
Reg. #: 077738
Description:
This course explores the history of state-sponsored violence in Central America, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, paying particular attention to questions of violence, memory, repression and human rights in these different contexts. We begin the course with a range of theoretical writings in the growing field of history and anthropology of violence. In the weeks that follow, we examine a series of overlapping case studies from the Caribbean, the Southern Cone, Central America and the United States. We set each national case study in historical context, read an analytical monograph, focus on significant testimonial literature and primary accounts of repression and subsequent struggles for memory, and watch a film or exhibit that develops the themes embedded in each place and time.
Course: AMS 500
Instructor: Cynthia Wu
Title: Comparative Ethnic Critiques in Asian American Studies
Day: Tuesday
Time: 2:45 a.m. – 5:45 p.m.
Location: 1004 Clemens
Reg. #: 464624
Description:
The presence of the Asian diaspora in the United States has always been intertwined with that of every other racial group, and it comes as to no surprise that the institutionalization of Asian American studies in the academy has—from its earliest beginnings—taken place alongside fields that address the histories of African Americans, Latina/os, and Native Americans. This seminar focuses on the complex dynamics of interracial social relations from the nineteenth century to the present through reading a variety of texts by social scientists, literary/cultural critics, and creative artists. We will examine how Asian Americans have functioned either as an exploited social and economic underclass or as class-privileged subjects that buffer between blacks and whites in the U.S. or, sometimes, both at once. Similarly, we will see how cross-racial coalitions between Asian Americans and other communities of color have alternately succeeded or failed throughout U.S. history.
Course: AMS 504
Instructor: Carl Nightingale
Title: Topics Cultural History: 2
Day: Thursday
Time: 12:00 p.m. – 2:50 p.m.
Location: Clemens 123
Reg. #: 233750
Description:
This course is the continuation of AMS 503, and will offer Graduate Students in American Studies an advanced introduction to some of the big problems in the field with a closer focus on the twentieth century. Some of these will include: Empire, Race, Popular Culture, American cities, the Political Economy of the New Deal Era; Neo-Liberal Globalization; the Americas in the World. As in AMS 503, faculty members from throughout the American Studies department as well as from other departments will make occasional guest appearances.
Course: AMS 520
Instructor: José Buscaglia
Title: On Cannibals
Days: Wednesday
Time: 1:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Location: 1028 Clemens
Reg. #: 059510
Description:
In the discourse of alterity, through which Europe and the Creole elites in America have attempted to frame and control all challenges to the claim to universal rulership, no other iconographic figure has been as radically distant from the ideal subject as that of the cannibal. For the past five hundred years cannibalism has been the main constitutive trope in the discourses of coloniality and empire of which the "War on Terror" is one of the latest iterations. Central to an understanding of identity politics it also serves as the ideological keystone that sustains the unsound edifice of the modern nation state. Our seminar will explore the invention and development of this elusive subject in the broadest array of iterations, including among others, its feminization and the notion of the European cannibal. Of particular interest will be the question of how the discourse of coloniality and the figure of America is appropriated by the Creole elites and recycled into the national narratives of plantation societies and the myths that attempted to validate the doctrine of Usonian expansionism and exceptionality. The readings will have a mixed provenance of European and Caribbean extraction: Columbus, Las Casas, Staden, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Sigüenza y Góngora, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Césaire, Palés Matos, C.L.R. James, Retamar, Lamming and others. We will also look critically at the casta paintings, works by Goya, depictions of the Haitian Revolution, and the iconography of Usonian expansionism from 1898 to the present.
Course: AMS 540
Instructor: Theresa McCarthy
Title: Critical Readings in Indigenous Scholarship
Days: Wednesday
Time: 10:30 am - 1:10 pm
Location: 1004 Clemens
Reg. #: 476811
Description:
This graduate seminar will explore the development of Native American/Indigenous Studies as an academic discipline though an in-depth survey of Indigenous scholarship. Particular emphasis will be placed on the theoretical contributions of Native scholars in the advancing articulations of Indigenous intellectual paradigms and epistemologies within the academy. While we will engage some of the path-breaking and canonical works in the field, we will also attend to more recent contributions that are garnering acclaim as increasingly innovative and “cutting-edge.” Along the way we will also focus on selected resources that have been community-generated, independently produced and/or published outside academia, acknowledging these as equally important to the development of Native American/Indigenous Studies.
Through our critical engagement with this growing body of scholarship we will attend to the distinct tenets and goals that anchored the discipline in its inception four decades ago. We will consider its investments in supporting the continuity of Indigenous cultures, traditions and languages; in sustaining the relational, spiritual, experiential and generative attributes of Indigenous knowledges; in defending the integrity of Indigenous nationhood and our inalienable relationships to our lands and territories; in promoting the reclamation of our histories, interpretive frameworks and institutional structures; and its efforts to transform the conditions of dominance that continue to impede the well-being and viability of Indigenous people. As we engage the readings throughout the seminar, we will continually reflect on the extent to which Native studies has been meaningful and effective in light of these objectives. Has it done what it set out to do? We will revisit key questions, including: What is the role of Native thought and tradition in the university? How do we “translate” pedagogy and epistemology from community to university and vice versa. These questions, in turn, prompt further contemplation of the function of Indigenous activism and community involvement within academic institutions.
Course: AMS 680/ ENG 647
Instructor: Dennis Tedlock
Title: Poetics Of The Americas
Day: Tuesday
Time: 12:30 p.m. – 3:10 p.m.
Location: Clemens 540
Reg. #: 166952
Description:
This seminar will be guided, in part, by a strategic (or provisional) essentialism. We will look and listen for poetry– whether past, ongoing, or projected– that is, specific, in some natural or cultural or linguistic sense, to the so-called Americas or New World or Western Hemisphere, or to Turtle Island. In the case of poetries from the indigenous languages of these worlds, we will try for modes of interpretation and translation that neither locate them on the margins of Eurocentric poetics nor assign them to a prehistory of poetics.
Texts dealing with the first contacts between Europeans and the peoples who were new to them will be read for clues to poetic differences, with special attention to native accounts of the invaders. We will also consider the radically indigenous writings of the Americas, with special attention to newly deciphered Mayan texts. Ancient Mayan literature, written in what turns out to be a largely phonetic script, begins earlier than English literature by about 900 years. Its re-emergence into readability, which comes at the same time as a major cultural renewal among contemporary Mayan peoples, poses major problems for Eurocentric cultural schemes and suggests a reconsideration of Charles Olson’s human universe.
One-page response papers will be due at each meeting, with a longer piece of work due at the end. Alternatives to term papers may be negotiated, including translations, writerly works, and performance pieces.
Short readings will include poems or essays by Humberto Ak’abal, Paula Gunn Allen, Mary Austin, Jorge Luis Borges, Daniel G. Brinton, Dell Hymes, Ah Maxam, Alonzo Gonzales Mó, Charles Olson, Simon Ortiz, Andrew Peynetsa, Kenneth Rexroth, Jerome Rothenberg, María Sabina, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gary Snyder, Luci Tapahonso, Nathaniel Tarn, Cecilia Vicuña, Lady Xok of Yaxchilán, and Ray Young Bear. Listenings will include a wide range of recorded performances in various indigenous languages of the Americas.
The assigned books are as follows: Ed Dorn and Gordon Brotherston, The Sun Unwound: Original Texts from Occupied America; Marc Shell and Werner Sollors, eds., The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other; Dennis Tedlock, Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and 2000 Years of Mayan Literature; Cecilia Vicuña, Instan.