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This course registers the tension between the domestic and the foreign that has long since haunted the ideal of American integration. We will look at the construction of "Chinatown" -- as historic reality, geographic formation, cultural fantasy, even architectural innovation -- in the making of the American nationalism. We will study novels, plays, films, and photography that focus on or use Chinatown as a central backdrop in ways that highlight the complex relationship between material history and social imagination when it comes to how America incorporates (or fails to digest) its racial or immigrant "other".
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
This course will explore the various meanings attributed to Nation of Islam (NOI) cultural and religious practices. Of particular concern will be the ways its ideological structure has allowed the NOI to function both as a "black nationalist" and religious body. Since the movement has historically been characterized by its charismatic leadership, we will spend time examining the lives of such figures as Wallace D. Fard, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrahkan. Other themes covered in the course will include: women and the NOI, the return to Orthodoxy, the NOI and black Christianity, and the NOI and political power.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
This introductory course focuses on texts from the mid-eighteenth century through the early 20th century; it will cover early texts such as poetry by Phillis Wheatley & Paul Laurence Dunbar; oratory by David Walker, Sojourner Truth; slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs; spirituals; black theatre by Pauline Hopkins, Bert Williams; fiction by Charles Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson; & non-fiction by W.E.B.DuBois, Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T. Washington. The course explores how black literature engages with the politics of cultural identity formation, notions of freedom, citizenship, and aesthetic forms.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
The period between 1900 and 1970 ushered in a tremendous growth in the numbers of African Americans in America's urban cities. During that time, unprecedented numbers of African Americans migrated from rural to urban areas and most significantly, from southern to northern locales. This interdisciplinary course will focus on cultural geography, or more precisely how the resulting changes and realignments of place and space have and continue to shape American society and affect understandings of African American identity and culture.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
In this seminar we will analyze the similarities and differences that characterize histories of interracial sexual relations in different political, social, economic, and legal contexts. We will focus on historical works that deal with interracial sexual relations in areas as diverse as colonial Zimbabwe, Cuba, Indonesia, and the U.S.A. Close attention will be paid to the methodological approaches our authors take and to the theoretical insights we can draw from our diverse case studies to help us better discern the common and singular threads running through this expansive field of inquiry.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
This course examines the dynamic and often conflicted relationships between African American struggles for inclusion, and the legislative, administrative, and judicial decision-making responding to or rejecting those struggles from Reconstruction to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. In tracing these relationships we will cover issues such as property, criminal law, suffrage, education, and immigration, with a focus on the following theoretical frameworks: equal protection, due process, civic participation and engagement, and political recognition.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
As articulated by Thelma Golden, postblack refers to the work of African American artists who emerged in the 1990s with ambitious, irreverent, and sassy work. Though hard to define, postblack suggested the emergence of a generation of artists removed from the long tradition of black affirmation of the Harlem Renaissance, black empowerment of the Black Arts movement, and identity politics of the 1980s and early 90s. This seminar provides an opportunity for a deep engagement with the work of African American artists of the past decade. It will involve critical and theoretical readings on multiculturalism, race, identity, and contemporary art.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
What if you grew up with a passport from one country, a face from another continent, an accent from yet another, and live somewhere related to none of them? What if the real answer to the question "Where are you from?" or "Where did you grow up?" is so complicated that you tend to give a convenient rather than honest answer? In this course, we will explore narratives of youthful cultural and linguistic adaptation by those who have spent their childhood crossing national boundaries. Among the topics of discussion will be how the narrators construct meaningful identities and produce a sense of belonging or alienation through narrative.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
Power is often represented as a "top-down" phenomenon, meaning that those who have the most power control what we do, what we know, and even how we feel. That is particularly the case in the study of marginalized people (e.g. African Americans) who are often not seen as creative agents, but as victims of the powerful. Contemporary cultural studies challenge the "top-down" understanding of power and look instead at the role of the individual in creating, recreating, and resisting power. This course will challenge both approaches from the perspectives of race, class, and gender.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
In what ways can we understand the current circulation and influence of artistic, scientific and technological forms between the West and Africa? Various literary and political movements such as Negritude and the Black Consciousness Movement shaped policies in Africa. Given the multidirectional flow of culture and technology, this seminar will examine: 1) The effect of the legacy of this literary and political movement on the African institutions; 2) Continent's struggle today through cultural expression such as musical styles, poetry, novel and visual art; 3) How immigrants contribute to these cultural expressions.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
An interdisciplinary introduction to the materials and methods of American Studies, focusing on the significance of place in U.S. history, society, and culture. We will look at place through several interpretive lenses, including social history, urban history, environmental studies and cultural studies. For Fall 2009, we will focus on four iconic cities: Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, and San Antonio. Specific topics may include: colonial contact; race and the built environment; migration and labor; music and citizenship. Texts and contexts will be equally wide-ranging, drawing on film, photography, architecture, history, music, fiction.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
This American Studies seminar explores the historical meaning of sound, music, and noise in American culture, and examines how new sonic technologies shape, and are shaped by, the values of the cultures that produce them. Topics range from the sonic characterization of Native Americans by European colonists, to the transformation of musical culture through digital technologies like the iPod. We will consider sound on slave plantations, in modern cities, in cinemas and shopping malls. We will examine how -- in all these places -- people's lives were shaped by what they heard.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
Although the idea of an "American Judaism" emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, scholars have yet to define this concept in precise terms and explain how it differs from a simpler historical understanding of "Judaism in America." Our seminar will examine the Americanization of Judaism beginning with the earliest transplanted Iberian concepts of Judaism in the "new world" to the transformation of Jewish religious life in the United States. Special attention will be paid to Jewish theology, the rabbinate, gender, denominationalism and the polity of the American synagogue.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar will examine how high-profile trials produce competing "stories" in the courtroom (and beyond) that shape the contours of fundamental conflicts in American culture. We will study, for example, the trials of John Brown (1859), John Scopes (1925), Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg (1951), and O.J. Simpson (1995) as spectacles that divided the nation along political, religious and racial lines. Readings will include trial transcripts and historical studies as well as literary and artistic interpretations of these events. Close attention will be given to the narrative and dramatic arts of trial advocacy.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
When it comes to the 1950s, common wisdom has it that the food was bad (and frozen), that cars bore fins and little else, that fashions were frivolous and the music sappy and sentimental; that gender relations were at an all time low and the nation's moral conscience dormant. Was this really the case? By exploring the primary sources of the period--its advertisements, landmark court cases, films and televisions programs, liturgy, press, fiction, nonfiction and poetry, memoir, material culture and song--we'll uncover a much more complex reality.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar looks historically at the ways in which Americans of the late 19th and 20th centuries both ordered and found meaning in their daily lives. It explores how earlier generations fed and clothed themselves, warded off illness, practiced their faith, made use of their free time and incorporated the latest technology, from automobiles to radios, into their homes. Particular attention will be paid to the methodology of material culture studies, an innovative approach to the past in which the study of things -- the stuff of history -- looms large.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
This course, taught by a writer and a historian, will study signal autobiographical writing in trans-Atlantic comparison, from the master diarist Samuel Pepys, through lives bogus (Robinson Crusoe), stoically female (a Maine midwife), and boyishly on the make (Boswell, Franklin). We will encounter self-consciously marginal Irishmen (Yeats, Joyce) and Southerners (Agee, Welty), the nervous splendor of Bloomsbury (Woolf), the distant battlefields of Vietnam (Herr), and the nearer trenches of family dysfunction (Gosse, Franzen). Themes include attitudes towards place, faith, work, privacy, intimacy, gender, fame, race, and self-fashioning.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
An introduction to the comparative study of human societies, focusing on the ways in which different peoples around the world behave and organize their beliefs and relationships. Based on ethnographic accounts and documentary films, the course examines a wide range of topics, including the relation of religion to economics and to politics, changing patterns of kinship and sex, and the interplay of global events and local worlds. The course familiarizes students with ethnographic methods and also places anthropological concepts and insights in historical perspective.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
Human adaptation focuses on human anatomy and behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Lectures and weekly laboratory sessions focus on the evolution of the human brain, dentition and skeleton to provide students with a practical understanding of the anatomy and function of the human body and its evolution, as well as some of its biological limitations. No science background is required on the part of the student.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
The seminar examines illness experiences and therapeutic practices as they are related to religious traditions worldwide. We will specifically look at the mind-body interface amid suffering and investigate how new medical technologies intermingle with belief systems and local forms of care. We will also consider how the themes of sacrifice and salvation are actualized in humanitarian and global health interventions and theorize emerging notions of wellbeing and human agency. Students will learn to analyze representations of religious experience and to conduct ethnographic interviews.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
This seminar addresses the social relations in which mental health, mental illness, and psycho-medical knowledge are entangled and produced. We will engage various cross-cultural approaches to mental conflicts and pathologies: psychoanalysis, ethnopsychology, biomedical psychiatry, transcultural psychiatry, and religious and "alternative" practices of diagnosis and healing. Drawing on ethnographic and clinical studies from Greek and other contexts, we will examine the role of culture in determining lines between normal and pathological, and consider the intertwining of psyche and body in human experience and behavior.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
This course provides an introduction to "doing" anthropology through the study and practice of fieldwork, and is meant to complement other Anthropology Department courses and independent work projects. Emphasizing seminar-style discussions and a "workshop" format, the course considers a variety of anthropological research methods and types of writing. Throughout, it aims to develop an understanding of key ideas like objectivism, interpretation, reflexivity, participant-observation, translation, and comparison.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
An introduction to the techniques of analysis that biological anthropologists apply to forensic (legal) cases. Topics include: the ethical and moral considerations of international forensic efforts, recovery of bodies, analysis of life history, reconstruction of causes of death, and case studies where anthropologists have contributed significantly to solving forensic cases. Discussions will include the limitations of the application of DNA recovery to skeletal/mummified materials; various case studies including recovery of body parts from the World Trade Towers site; and uncovering gravesites in Bosnia and Iraq.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
The objectives of this course are essentially threefold: (1) to familiarize students with the anthropological study of ritual, or how the question of ritual has been posed within the discipline of anthropology; (2) to explore and understand how ritual structures and restructures the relations, actions, and experiences of human beings, and (3) to examine how ritual exploits and dramatizes the kinds of experience that we call "social" or "historical." Finally, the course explores the impact of the media and globalization, diasporas, and the plays of 'modernity' and 'tradition' on the practice of ritual.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
Medical anthropology looks at the interaction of illness, social environment, and medicine from a cross-cultural perspective. It compares non-medical models of disease causality and healing with biomedical ones, and explores how social and technological inequalities shape disease and health outcomes. Students learn to collect and interpret individual illness narratives as well as to assess the cultural and political dynamics of global health problems. The course draws from ethnography, medical journals, media reports and films.
Score: 6.8703275 Details | Listing | Web page
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