Approaches to American Studies
V18.0201  Formerly V13.0001. Given every year. 4 points.
Offers a survey of American studies as dynamic fields of scholarship. Using a schedule of keywords, it engages key themes and concerns, including war’s role in social and political development, the meaning of borders, the politics of entertainment, public interest in private affairs, and the interplay of goods and labor in shaping national (and transnational) conditions of fulfillment and dignity. It is intended to serve as a gateway to lines of inquiry and analysis currently animating interdisciplinary study of “America”; as an opportunity to relate current debates to respective historical contexts; and as an occasion to interrogate presumptions of the United States’ exceptionality, at a time when its interrelation with broader worlds becomes ever more clear.

American Sojourners: U.S. as Traveler’s Tale
V18.0220  Formerly V13.0201. Given every other year. 4 points.
Beginning with classic works of European accounts of the early republic, proceeds through the 19th and 20th centuries with the writings of Sarmiento, Marti, Myrdal, James, De Beauvoir, and Naipaul, among others. It reconstructs a tradition of national analysis from beyond its margins. Key themes include classic debates over U.S. “national character” (ethics of enterprise and labor, scope of democratic participation, implications of individualism, extent of imperial ambition, and contradictions of social hierarchy) as well as specific genres of travel and expatriate expression (naturalist, picaresque, patriotic, cosmopolitan). Mixing letters, articles, full analytic comment, and extraliterate documents such as music, photography, and painting with scholarship on travel in social and historical context, it reconstructs traditions of “outlandish” commentary on the United States, thus exploring a crucial counternarrative regarding the roots of American Studies as a critical method.

W. E. B. Du Bois and the Roots of Critical Race Thinking
V18.0223  Formerly V13.0202. Green. Given every other year. 4 points.
Addresses the work of the black thinker and leader W. E. B. Du Bois, who has long been acclaimed as the preeminent thinker in the African American tradition. Increasingly, though, he is seen as an indispensable modern intellectual, one whose ideas shape current lives and concerns. In examining Du Bois, we pursue changing ideas of intellectual responsibility in the modern world; clarify the unique way Du Bois merged self-, racial, and historical awareness into critical method; and relate his tendency to see race as a social construction, an approach that is transforming intellectual, social, and cultural life in the United States.

Comparative U.S. Ethnic Studies
V18.0224  Formerly V13.0204. Given every fifth semester. 4 points.
Serves as an introduction to the interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity in the United States and to the range of identities and issues inherent in American culture. No previous knowledge of ethnic studies is presumed, but the goal of the class it to create a framework for thoughtful discussion and analysis of race and ethnicity for students to use long after the completion of the class.

Intersections: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in U.S. History and Politics
V18.0230  Formerly V13.0301, titled Gender and Cultural History. Prerequisite: V18.0201. Duggan. Given every other year. 4 points.
Drawing on the histories of African, Asian, Latino, European, and Native Americans of both genders and many sexualities, the course explores the complex and important intersection of gender, race, and sexuality in the United States from the 17th century through the 20th, in historically related case studies. Starting in the period of European imperialism in the Americas, it examines the ways that gender, race, and sexuality shaped cultural and political policies and debates surrounding the Salem witch trials; slavery, abolition, and lynching; U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico and Hawaii; the politics of welfare and reproduction; cultural constructions of manliness, masculinity, and citizenship; and responses to the AIDS pandemic in a global context.

Empire for Liberty: The U.S. in the 19th Century
V18.0231  Identical to V57.0618. Johnson. Given every year. 4 points.
This course tells the story of how the welter of social and cultural tendencies and tensions that characterized the first half of the 19th century in the U.S. were channeled into a war between two regions, the North and the South. It is expansive in its framing of the Civil War era and broad in its treatment of the international dimensions of U.S. history. By seeking to place the central event of the century in a history of diplomacy and warfare that also included the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, illegal invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s, and the Spanish-American War, it attempts to illuminate the imperial causes and consequences of this domestic conflict. And by embedding the conflict over slavery in the U.S. into the histories of the Haitian Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, Indian removal, the Atlantic cotton economy, and the hemispheric history of antislavery, it seeks to call into question the nationalist and regionalist framing of the event that has dominated most mainstream accounts.

Ethnicity and the Media
V18.0232  Formerly V13.0302. Prerequisite: V18.0201 or one introductory APA, Africana, Anthropology, or World Cultures MAP course, or professor’s approval. Dávila. Given every other year. 4 points.
Examines media images in relation to the making of ethnic and racial identities in the United States. Surveys some of the theoretical approaches to the study of images, paying particular attention to the intersection of history and ideologies or representation. Looks into the nature and politics of stereotypes; inquires into their reproduction through discourses, representations, and practices; and then moves to a comparative examination of media images in relation to the making of African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American images in the media, looking specifically at changes and continuities in the representation of these four minority groups in the media.

Studies in Popular Culture
V18.0251  Formerly V13.0304. Prerequisite: V18.0201 or V41.0200 or instructor’s approval. Harper. Given every other year. 4 points.
Introduces students to the serious study of contemporary popular culture as it is manifested in several overlapping mass-media formations. More specifically, it considers the distinct but interrelated functions of various mass-cultural modes (for example, popular music, cinema, television) within an increasingly conglomerated entertainment industry that targets increasingly diversified audience constituencies. Through a highly selective case study approach, students are quickly familiarized with the specific critical considerations demanded by each form under review. In-depth attention is given to particular genres characteristic of each medium, and to the linkages among the different media in their joint constitution of a generalized contemporary mass culture.

Topics: Controversies in American Politics and Popular Culture: Case Studies of Race, Sex, and Gender
V18.0280  Formerly V13.0400. Given every year. 4 points.
Examines the relationship between the cultural and political spheres with a focus on the representation of race, sex, and gender within mass-mediated controversies and scandals. Interdisciplinary in nature, it considers a wide range of topics including reproduction, the law, sports, the presidency, the trial, pornography, secrecy, music, opinion journalism, hate speech, and the news.

RELATED COURSES

The following courses in individual disciplines are open to American Studies minors. See the departmental sections for course descriptions.

GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Queer Cultures
V18.0450  Formerly V13.0419 and V97.0419. See description under Gender Studies.

ENGLISH

Writing New York
V18.0757  Formerly V13.0180. Identical to V41.0180.

African American Literary Cultures
V18.0770  Formerly V13.0185 and V99.0180. Identical to V41.0185.

HISTORY

Seminar: Historicizing American Popular Culture
V18.0771  Formerly V13.0699. Identical to V57.0699.

LATINO STUDIES

The Latinized City, New York and Beyond
V18.0540  Formerly V13.0305. Prerequisite: V18.0501 or any introductory course in the social sciences or MAP course in World Cultures.