"The U.S. in the World" Description & Spring 2008 Courses
The Institute's proposal to create "The U.S. in the World," a certificate program for undergraduates, is currently awaiting approval.
The Institute for Critical U.S. Studies at Duke proposes an interdisciplinary Undergraduate Certificate, “The U.S. in the World,” which students can earn in conjunction with a major in any department or program in Trinity College . Students enrolled in the program would be able to choose from a variety of courses in different disciplines to construct a sequence of courses that complements the major field of study and teaches them to analyze the variable relationships that have been constructed between the United States and areas around the globe. Students will learn to examine the ways in which the very concept of the United States may be (and has been) reformulated and reconceived in response to shifting economic, social, and political, and intellectual developments. Students will conduct their studies within a framework of close faculty guidance. Completion of the certificate requirements will academically recognize students' intensive, interdisciplinary study of Critical U.S. Studies.
Below is a partial list of Spring 2008 courses that would count for credit towards "The U.S. in the World" certificate:
AAAS 129/WST114/CULANTH 129: Culture/Politics in the
Caribbean (Michaeline Crichlow)
Perspectives on the Caribbean as a geo-political and socio-cultural region, and on contemporary Caribbean diaspora cultures. How the region's long and diverse colonial history has structured relationships among race, ethnicity, class, gender and power, as well as how people have challenged these structures. The processes by which the meeting and mixing of peoples and cultures has occurred in this region in which there have been massive transplantations of peoples and their cultures from Africa, Asia, and Europe, and upon which the United States has exerted considerable influence.
AAAS 299S/ICS 299s: Cultural Fusions and Confusion (Michaeline Crichlow)
The
question of citizenship-its claims and nonclaims stalks nation-states, challenging popular assertions about how transnationalism, deterritorialization and rootlessness undermine these statuses. How do claims of belonging play themselves out among African and Indian descended populations in places where slavery and indentureship thrived e.g., the Caribbean, Fiji and Africa? How do these populations (still) play with and maneuver around colonial constructions of each other? The course will explore these questions in relation to: landownership, cultural heritage and authenticity. We will consider the revision of histories and explore the general cultural politics that sustain and bolster claims of authenticity within the nation's spaces. Consequently, we will focus on the socio-cultural and political strategies that these populations deploy to bypass the various processes that seek to negate critical aspects of their presences.
AAAS 199/MUSIC 120: Cultural Politics/ Soul Music (Mark Anthony Neal)
This course will examine the development of Soul Music in the late 1950s and trace its critical role in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. In addition the course will chart the transition of Soul from musical genre into a cultural movement that reaches its peak in the mid-1970s and gets re-appropriated in the early 1990s as part of the Post-Soul Movement.
HIS 104: Baseball in Global Perspective (John Thompson)
The course surveys the history of baseball from its 18th Century origins in Britain's North American colonies to the contemporary “World Baseball Classic,” in which teams from six continents compete for an international championship. We consider how a folk game became an amateur participant sport and eventually a spectator sports business based in the United States and Canada; how baseball was constructed as an essential element of American identity; how baseball migrated globally; how the game was culturally reshaped in the countries it migrated to; and how globalization changed the game in the USA.
AAAS 199S/HIS 106S/LIT162ZS: America in Black and Brown (Alvero Andres Reyes)
Too often academic discourse about the 1960's has been limited to a consideration of the actions of students in Paris and Berkeley during 1968.
This class will deepen our understanding of the 1960's by showing the centrality of actions taken by people of color on and off college campuses across the United States actions that began in the late 1950's and
continued into the early 1970's. We will begin with an examination of the global context of the revolts that occurred during this epoch (African Decolonization, Viet Nam, ...etc). We will then concentrate on the content of
the expression of this era within Black and Latino radical movements,most specifically, the Black Panther Party, The Young Lords Organization, and the Chicano Movement. Although these movements varied widely in their historical roots and political trajectories, it was common in this era to believe that they were united by the thesis that each of these communities within the United States constituted a nation within a nation. We will closely examine the aesthetic and mythopoetic imaginary that helped to sustain this thesis, be it in the context of the black belt, Aztlan, or Borinquen.
ENGLISH 151: American Literature to 1820 (Matt Cohen)
Through the study of a range of written texts, songs, and film, this course will take up the difficult questions of early American literature. What, in fact, could "American" literature mean in a contested landscape peopled with a vast number of different native oral literatures and Europeans and African slaves of many different nationalities? We will pursue the theme of encounter in several contexts, examining how races, genders, classes, religions, and notions of nationality confront, modify, accommodate, hybridize and/or destroy each other in this period. Texts will likely include native myths, speeches and songs, narratives by Spanish explorers and by English settlers such as Thomas Morton and William Bradford, texts by Anne Bradstreet, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Phyllis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, an early American novel, and films such as The Mission, Pocahontas, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
LIT162SZ/SP 181S: Do You Speak Spanglish? (Antonio Viego)
Pundits, critics and fortune tellers have announced that by the year 2050 U.S. Latino/as will number close to 100 million, constituting the third largest Latin American nation, behind Brazil and Mexico. The interpretative contortions necessary to think that Latino/as in the U.S. can constitute a “nation” in the first place are a testament to the more general interpretative contortions that mark the contemporary discourse on Latinidad when it is that theorists of all stripes think it in relation to the future, which is the tense that appears to naturally elect itself for these discussions. Does it matter that we don't precisely know what we mean or whom we mean to include or exclude when we invoke Latinidad? In Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City, Mike Davis's writes, “Yet, if there is no reducible essence to latinidad—even in language or religion—it does not necessarily follow that there is no substance. …To be Latino in the United States is rather to participate in a unique process of cultural syncretism that may become a transformative template for the whole society.” In other words, it is not so much a question of what “Latino/a” is but rather what “Latino/a” does. Given the capaciousness of the term right now, can we expect it to continue to swell and lengthen its sticky tendrils' reach or will it shrink, become miserly in its old age and begin to hold stubbornly to a ruthless, discerning door policy? The ubiquitous announcement in Latino/a cultural and political critique that the future will be Latino/a and will be broadcast, by the way, in Spanglish shares time and space with a similarly enthusiastic claim made on the past. To wit, the now 15-year-old mammoth national historical project, “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Tradition” traces the “Hispanic” literary heritage back to the 1500s. This interdisciplinary course is designed to serve as a general introduction to the field of Latino/a studies. I will provide coverage of some contemporary theoretical and critical drifts in Latino/a studies, trying to stay alive to the moments where Latino/a and Chicano/a studies cross and overlap and where they may be said to separate due to their historically different institutional trajectories and by virtue of their differently elected points of focus and objects of study. In the process I will explore the assumed critical and political potentialities announced by some theorists regarding the post-raciological subject that inheres in the nominatory term, “Latino/a”—a subject construction supposedly outside and beyond the prison houses of race and ethnicity. Finally I ask after the tasks at hand for the Latino/a studies educator and the Latino/a student in the context of globalization, contemporary U.S. universities' preferred brand of diversity discourses, critical multiculturalism, and “coercive mimeticism,” a term recently coined by Rey Chow (2003) that names the process whereby ethnic-racialized subjects are bullied into resembling what is “recognizably ethnic” in order to claim some modicum of social and cultural intelligibility.