Courses
Course Schedules
Course Descriptions
Spring 2010 - Undergraduate Course Descriptions
Course: AMS 100 (cross-listed with DMS 212)
Instructor: Barry White
Title: Indian Image on Film
Days: Wednesday
Time: 4:10 pm – 6:50 pm
Location: 17 Clemens
Reg. #: 354369
Description:
Images of Indians are a real part of the American Cultural process. The indigenous viewpoints about these images will be a central theme for this learning experience. An overview of the “image” will emerge as we critique and visualize the Indian image on film. Documentaries, oral histories, articles, fine arts films and feature length film will be the mediums used to present the Indian Images of Film.
Course: AMS 107 B
Instructor: Sunanda Ray
Title: Introduction to American Studies
Days: Tuesday & Thursday
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:20 pm
Location: 17 Clemens
Reg. #: 218591
Description:
This course is designed to introduce students to the discipline of American Studies. It explores the ways in which literature and popular culture have represented American identity both to Americans and to others in this hemisphere and around the world. It introduces students to some of the primary questions in American Studies, such as “What is ‘America’ and who is ‘American’?” What is the relationship between history and literature in shaping American identity and culture? To address these queries, this course draws from a variety of texts and genres, including history, fiction, poetry, film, and music. We will especially explore these questions through an analysis of a range of multicultural works of literature by African American, Asian American, Native American, and Latino/a American writers. Students will read, discuss, and analyze how “American” identities have been shaped by intersecting issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. The multi and interdisciplinary methods and frameworks that constitute the field of American Studies will be highlighted. The course will also investigate the various “myths” that are associated with what is uniquely “American” and examine alternative perspectives to our understanding of American culture and identity.
Possible Texts:
Gary Colombo et al, eds. Rereading America: Cultural Contexts for Critical Thinking and Writing (Seventh Edition)
Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself
Films:
Crash
Brokeback Mountain
Killing Us Softly
Course: AMS 107 K
Instructor: Kritika Agarwal
Title: Introduction to American Studies
Days: Monday, Wednesday & Friday
Time: 11:00 am – 11:50 am
Location: 146 Park
Reg. #: 078955
Description:
This course is designed to introduce students to the inter-disciplinary field of American Studies. In this class, we will be asking questions such as: What is America and how has it been shaped historically by intersecting issues of race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and nation? Who counts as an "American" and who does not? What does it mean to be "American?" We will attempt to answer these questions through a critical analysis of popular culture and a variety of texts including, but not limited to, fiction, poetry, newspaper articles, film, etc.
Course: AMS 113 A
Instructor: Jeffry Iovannone
Title: American Lives & Environments - "Sexuality and Popular Culture"
Days: Tuesday & Thursday
Time: 12:30 pm – 1:50 pm
Location: 4 Clemens
Reg. #: 400753
Description:
This incarnation of American Lives and Environments will take as its focus theintertwined concepts of sexuality and American popular culture. We will explorehow sexuality is a major defining factor of American society both past andpresent through a critical examination of various pop cultural forms such as:television, film, contemporary fiction, graphic novels, visual art, memoirs, andnews media. Particular attention will be paid to how popular culture influencesand shapes our perceptions of sexuality and vice versa, and how it can be used asa tool to think about sexuality differently. We will consider sexuality as notan exclusive category of identity but also how it interacts with issues ofgender, race, class, and disability where appropriate. Note that while this isnot a gay and lesbian studies course, per say, we will address the issue ofsexuality from a multiplicity of perspectives.
Course: AMS 149
Instructor: Cynthia Wu
Title: Asian American Literary Arts and Activism
Days: Monday, Wednesday & Friday
Time: 9:00 am – 9:50 am
Location: 108 Baldy
Reg. #: 071721
Description:
This course is an introduction to the ways in which Asian Americans, historically, have used and continue to use literature and the other creative arts (i.e., performance, film and video, etc.) to advance the cause of social justice. We will read and discuss a wide variety of texts from the 1930’s to the present, addressing labor exploitation, the World War II Japanese American internment, the present-day struggles of southeast Asian refugees, and other topics.
Course: AMS 179
Instructor: Barry White
Title: Introduction to Native American History
Days: Monday
Time: 4:10 pm – 6:50 pm
Location: 17 Clemens
Reg. #: 280097
Description:
This course will be both a contemporary and cultural history of indigenous people of the North American continent. We will develop a new perspective on Native American History as we explore various oral traditions and read accounts of Native history. Documentary videos will be used to enhance the student's understanding surrounding native issues. Emphasis will be given to the 19th and 20th century interaction between native nations and North American “government.”
Course: AMS 209 A
Instructor: Katie McMahon
Title: Musics of the World - "American Popular Music"
Days: Monday, Wednesday & Friday
Time: 10:00 am – 10:50 am
Location: 119 Clemens
Reg. #: 401447
Description: Music is a universal language that transcends geographical borders and socially constructed boundaries such as race and ethnicity. Its capacity to connect peoples of various backgrounds spanning thousands of miles is indicative of the power it beholds. As a strong tenet in popular culture, music has served as an underlying force in the dissemination of ideologies, social constructions, and stereotypes of peoples of the world. This section of Musics of the World will probe the ways in which specific musical genres, movements, and artists of the Americas during the 20th century have contributed to the social constructions of race, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and disability. Some examples of genres/movements/artists that will be examined include minstrelsy, hip hop, reggae, jazz, rock and roll, habanera, Madonna, Beyonce, Django Reinhardt, Bob Marley, and Michael Jackson. While this course is not intended as a survey of 20th century popular music of the Americas, some knowledge of its music history will be necessary in examining the social constructions listed above and will therefore be part of the material covered over the course of the semester. The course will be organized chronologically by specific genres (such as minstrelsy, jazz, etc) which will be explored through the use of scholarly articles, films, musical examples, and guest lectures. Focusing on specific musical genres will allow for the opportunity to not only deconstruct issues such as race, class, and ethnicity within the context of that particular genre, but also to examine how it affected the social, cultural, and political history of the Americas. Course requirements include active class participation, weekly response papers, discussion questions, a group presentation/project, and a final research paper.
Texts
The Pop, Rock, and Soul Reader: Histories and Debates.
American Popular music: From Minstrelsy to MP3
Films
“Delovely”
“Cadillac Records”
“Ray”
“The Cotton Club”
“Dreamgirls”
“La Bamba”
Course: ENG 270
Instructor: Susan Moynihan
Title: Asian American Literature
Days: Monday, Wednesday & Friday
Time: 1:00 pm – 1:50 pm
Location: 90 Alumni
Reg. #: 324136
Description:
This course provides a general introduction to Asian American literature and the field’s literary, cultural, and political concerns. “Asian America,” as a panethnic coalition born in the response to racism and Orientalism, has been the site of tremendous, yet varied, literary production. The texts we will explore represent issues as diverse as the challenges of Chinatown life during the early 20th century anti-Chinese “Exclusion Era”; Japanese American internment during World War II; the mixed-race legacy of American military bases in Korea; the ironies marking the young lives of the Vietnamese refugees from “Operation Babylift”; and the impact of 9/11 for Pakistani Americans living in New York City. The contradictions of postcolonial Philippines will be explored critically through a postmodern lens. Contemporary anxieties of race, gender, and sexuality will come to the fore in the work of graphic novels. Throughout the course we will ask how Asian American writers respond to the politics of race and American imaginings of Asia, and how the literary texts register this response in terms of genre, narrative structure, character construction, and style. Required texts most likely will include Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy, Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, Aimee Phan’s short-story collection We Should Never Meet, Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Shortcomings, and H.T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands.
Course: AMS 278 (cross-listed with HIS 304)
Instructor: Camilo Trumper
Title: Art and Revolutionary Politics in Latin AmericaDays: Tuesday & Thursday
Time: 12:30 pm – 1:50 pm
Location: 17 Clemens
Reg. #: 276228
Description:
This course examines the history of political change in twentieth-century LatinAmerica through the prism of art and aesthetics. We focus on three central areas– Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua – where revolutionary political change has gonehand in hand with aesthetic and artistic production. Our goal is to study the political history of these places, but to do so in a way that incorporates a range of materials and documents that are often left out of traditional political histories – namely visual culture and visual sources including but not limited to film, photography, theater, political muralism, poster art, performance art, and graffiti. We will divide the course into three sections that correspond to our three national case studies, but we will also keep an eye toward trans-national influences and movements. This class will be run as a seminar: students will be asked to read selections from monographs and articles, discuss these in our bi-weekly meetings, and complete three written assignments throughout the semester.
Course: AMS 364
Instructor: Ruth Meyerowitz
Title: Seminar for Majors - "The American Dream"
Days: Monday
Time: 2:00 pm – 4:40 pm
Location: 1004 Clemens
Reg. #: 454666
Description:
This course explores the “American Dream” from the perspectives of diverse ethnic and racial groups, as well as class and gender considerations. We will investigate various ways in which different groups have defined this ideal; the extent to which they have experienced variations of the dream; and adapted to, challenged, and/or rejected the hegemony of what has been referred to as mainstream American culture. How have notions of the “American Dream” shaped and been shaped by American culture? In what ways have the mythic connotations of the dream helped and hindered the creation of a national identity? How have the dynamics of race, ethnicity, class, and gender impacted people’s ability to obtain the “American Dream?” What might the future hold for our understanding of American culture? Our examination will include both primary and interpretive documents—autobiographies, novels, essays, films, works of art, poems, and popular culture.
Possible texts include, A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki; The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide by Meizhu Lui, Barbara Robles, and Betsy Leondar-Wright; Bread Givers: A Novel by Anzia Yezierska and Alice Kessler-Harris; Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes; Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody; Born on the 4th of July by Ron Kovic; Out of the Furnace: A Novel of Immigrant Labor in America by Thomas Bell; and Journey of Hope, Memoirs of a Mexican Girl:
An autobiography of an illegal immigrant girl from Guanajuato, Mexico who immigrated to Los Angeles, California, and eventually became an American Citizen by Rosalina Rosay.
Course: AMS 381 (cross-listed with HMN 325 & LLS 305)
Instructor: Craig Centrie
Title: Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Religion
Days: Tuesday & Thursday
Time: 12:30 pm – 1:50 pm
Location: 146 Park
Reg. #: 259885
Description:
Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Religions is a multi disciplinary course drawing on the social sciences and humanities within a post-modern framework. The purpose of this course is to generally explore the syncratic religions of the Caribbean and Latin America. This course will focus primarily on the ontology and practice of Vaudou in Haiti and Santeria in Cuba. In addition, we will discuss a number of similar Latino/Caribbean religions and compare them to Vaudou and Santeria. By doing so, students will have an in-depth understanding of all traditional religions and their societies, rather than an overview of many.
This course will also examine traditional societies versus contemporary modern and technologically advanced societies to understand the philosophical and social underpinnings of both, and the extent to which social values contribute to a culture, functioning for or against its participants. We also explore the advantages and disadvantages of traditional and modern societies.
Course objectives also include a hands on experience with ethnographic data collection, and a understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of Anthropological field work for those students are interested in learning the fundamentals of ethnographic data collection and analysis. This final objective is recommended for Anthropology students but not required for others.
Course: AMS 382 (cross-listed with ENG 407 & APY 384)
Instructor: Dennis Tedlock
Title: Books of Ancient Mayas
Days: Tuesday & Thursday
Time: 9:30 am – 10:50 am
Location: 213 Norton
Reg. #: 163028
Description:
The ancient Maya painted inscriptions on pottery, modeled them in stucco, and carved them in stone. They also wrote on long sheets of paper, folded accordion-fashion to make books with jaguar-skin covers. These books were instruments for seeing; they made it possible for readers to recover the perfect sight that humans had enjoyed before the gods misted their vision. Readers could know what was far away, or what had happened in the past or was about to happen, whether in the divine realms of the sky and the underworld, or in the human realm on the surface of the earth. The temporal framework for these happenings was provided by a calendar that took account of the movements of the sun, moon, planets, stars, and seasons. Four Mayan books survived in hieroglyphic form, having escaped the bonfires of the sixteenth-century missionaries. Other books survive because Mayan scribes created alphabetically written versions (in their own languages) after the Spanish conquest and (in some places) continued to add new chapters as late as the nineteenth century. The best known alphabetic works are the Chilam Balam or “Jaguar Priest” books, written in Yucatec Maya, and the Popol Vuh or “Council Book,” written in K’iche’ Maya. In addition, a great deal of ancient knowledge was and is transmitted orally, all the way down through the millions of speakers of Mayan languages who live in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and the United States. In the case of the ancient inscriptions and books, we will examine the results of recent breakthroughs in the decipherment of the Mayan script and even learn to read some hieroglyphs, picking up some basic knowledge of astronomy in the process. In the case of the alphabetically written books and contemporary oral sources, we will read English translations of narratives, prayers, speeches, chants, and songs, at the same time listening to what some of these forms sound like in the original languages.
Course: AMS 387 (cross-listed with AAS 383)
Instructor: Theresa Runstedtler
Title: Black Atlantic World
Days: Tuesday & Thursday
Time: 11:00 am – 12:20 pm
Location: 17 Clemens
Reg. #: 313928
Description:
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line, the question as to how far differences of race . . . are going to be made, hereafter, the basis of denying to over half the world the right of sharing to their utmost ability the opportunities and privileges of modern civilization.” -W. E. B. Du Bois, “To the Nations of the World,” 1900
From the earliest days, African American thinkers, activists, and artists realized that their racial oppression was not just an American phenomenon, but part of a much larger, international problem routed in the transatlantic flows of slavery, imperialism, and the rise of capitalism. This course endeavors to uncover this buried history of the freedom struggle to encourage students to think beyond the popular narratives of the Civil Rights Movement. Through primary and secondary source readings, we will examine alternative theoretical models for thinking about African American politics and culture, including the applicability of Pan-Africanism, Marxism, the black Atlantic, anti-imperialism, postcolonialism, and internationalism. In turn, this course also adds the often overlooked questions of empire, nationalism, class, gender, and racial construction to the debate. Arguably, W. E. B. Du Bois’ idea of “double consciousness” was not just a comment on the paradox of being black and American, but also about the dilemma of whether to work within the constraints of U.S. politics or to reach across national, racial, and ethnic boundaries in search of alliances – or both. From a practical skills point of view, this course will also explore the mechanics of historical writing, including analyzing primary sources and the art of making scholarly arguments.
Course: AMS 437 (cross-listed with HMN 475, CPM 475 & LLS 475)
Instructor: Craig Centrie
Title: Latino Masculinity
Days: Tuesday & Thursday
Time: 2:00 pm – 3:20 pm
Location: 4 Clemens
Reg. #: 054855
Description:
The purpose of this course is to explore Latino Masculinity in Latin America and the US. The first half of this course will explore notions of masculinity from an Anthropological perspective and to examine machismo in Latin American culture. We will explore the origins of male behavioral patterns, how they are expressed in society, and the overall repercussions of such patterns in a contemporary setting. Awareness of macho behavior patterns, their psychological implications, and the examination of patriarchal social mores in Latin America will be our lens for examining Latino Culture. In addition, the roles of women will be examined within this hegemonic patriarchal structure. Examples of questions to be explored are: who perpetuates the myth of machismo, what are the perceived benefits to the individual, and how and in what ways are the notions of machismo able to persist when they essentially undermine themselves?
The second half of this course will further examine concepts of masculinity by focusing on how homosexuality is expressed and interpreted within machismo culture. How does a society balance itself when confronted with notions of hyper-masculinity and repressed homosexuality? How do women function in a society that both cherishes virginity and chastity but encourages young males to be sexually promiscuous? Why is homosexuality more accepted in one culture, and less in another? What terms and behavior are used to define homosexual behavior in Latino cultures and from where do these presumed classifications come? How does the machismo male differentiate himself from his homosexual counterpart? When the essential characteristics of hyper-masculinity seem to rely upon self-delusion and self denial, who is really in the closet and who is not?
Masculinity will be discussed as a product of preexisting social conditions, the social development of machismo will be presented as a defining but corruptible social phenomenon and homosexuality will be studied within the framework of masculinity and male behavior. All male behavior will be deconstructed and reevaluated within a contemporary model of sexuality and gendering.
Course: AMS 437 (cross-listed with LLS 482)
Instructor: Ramón Soto-Crespo
Title: Latino Short Stories
Days: Thursday
Time: 4:00 pm – 6:50 pm
Location: 17 Clemens
Reg. #: 292615
Description:
In this course we will examine the most important short narratives of U.S. Latino writers. Themes for discussion include: migration, machismo, feminism, sexuality, gender, racism, reality/fantasy, and magical realism. We will read works by Sandra Cisneros, Junot Diaz, Esmeralda Santiago, Achi Obejas, Julia Alvarez, Rosario Ferre, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Ana Lydia Vega, and Nicholasa Mohr. Grade will be based on response papers, short examinations, and class participation. The course will be conducted in English.
Course: AMS 448 (cross-listed with LLS 481)
Instructor: Ramón Soto-Crespo
Title: Latino American Cinema
Days: Tuesday
Time: 4:00 pm – 6:50 pm
Location: 250 Park
Reg. #: 362574
Description:
This course will cover the most innovative films produced in Latin America in recent decades. Special attention will be given to the new cinema and the critical theory proposing the creation of a new Latino American aesthetic. Some of the films discussed are: Amores Perros, Before Night Falls, Che, Los Olvidados, Kiss of the Spider Woman, La Mujer de mi Hermano, El Padre Amaro, Y tu Mama Tambien, and Nine Queens. Grade will be based on response papers, short examinations, and participation. All films will have English subtitles. The course will be conducted in English.
Please see the American Studies course descriptions in the Undergraduate Catalog.