Readings in American Culture: texts and discourses 4219-AL104
opening sessions will look at Black feminist and feminist historical
analyses to examine slavery, reproductive law, punishment, labor, and the carceral organization of gender. Animal studies and posthumanist readings will be examined as challenging the stability of the human/animal divide. These methods show how species discourse participates in racial formation, imperial governance, urbanization, masculinity, and environmental thought. Critical race scholarship shifts attention from individual prejudice to the material organization of vulnerability: racial capitalism, uneven development, environmental racism, racists speces and geographies, public-health disparities, infrastructure, policing. A unit on visuality and the archive will consider how photographs, legal records, databases, and historical methods make some lives visible while reducing others to property, evidence, data, or silence. Native American and
Indigenous studies question traditional models of race by foregrounding sovereignty, treaty relations, land, ecological knowledge, kinship, and the racialized extraction of Indigenous labor. Toward the end of the course units bring disability studies and critical border studies into the conversation. They examine how bodily norms have been used to regulate slavery, immigration, citizenship, labor, and public display, while material objects and landscapes become active participants in border enforcement.
Students attending this course will practice close reading, conceptual comparison, historically grounded interpretation, and ethical engagement with difficult archives.
Course coordinators
Type of course
Mode
Learning outcomes
Upon the completion of the course, students will be able to
KNOWLEDGE
1. Explain the central concepts and methodological approaches of
feminist analysis, critical race studies, animal studies,
posthumanism, archive studies, Native American and Indigenous
studies, disability studies, and critical border studies.
2. Describe how various categories such as race, gender, class,
disability, species, citizenship, and sovereignty are produced
historically in relation to one another.
3. Explain how law, capitalism, empire, state institutions, infrastructure, visual culture, technology, and archives shape unequal power relations in the US.
SKILLS
1. Perform close, conceptually readings of complex theoretical,
historical, and interdisciplinary texts.
4. Compare arguments across fields and identify various tensions,
shared assumptions, and differences in scale or method.
5. Evaluate archives, images, datasets, legal texts, and material objects
as constructed and forms of evidence that have ethical dimensions.
6. Formulate focused research questions and present evidence-based interpretations in clear academic English, both orally and in writing.
SOCIAL COMPETENCIES
1. Understand the nature of knowledge as situated and as having
ethical consequences.
7. Participate in rigorous discussion of contested concepts and
histories.
8. Relate scholarly debates to contemporary public problems.
Assessment criteria
Requirements:
Midterm and final exam 2 x 30%
Group final projects 30%
Class attendance and participation 10%
Grading scale:
0–50%: 2 — Fail
51–60%: 3 — Satisfactory
61–70%: 3+ — Satisfactory Plus
71–80%: 4 — Good
81–90%: 4+ — Good Plus
91–96%: 5 — Very Good
97–100%: 5! — Excellent / Very Good Plus
Bibliography
The reading list will be a selection from the following (the bibliography is
long but the assigned reading load will be reasonable).
FEMINIST ANALYSIS
Haley, Sarah. “‘Like I Was a Man’: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the
Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia.” Signs 39, no. 1 (2013):
53-77.
Morgan, Jennifer L. “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and
Reproduction in Colonial Slavery.” Small Axe 22, no. 1 (2018): 1-17.
ANIMAL STUDIES
Davis, Janet M. “Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and the Moral Politics
of American Empire and Nation Building.” American Quarterly 65, no. 3
(2013): 549-574.
Freccero, Carla. “Carnivorous Virility; or, Becoming-Dog.” Social Text 29,
no. 1 (2011): 177-195.
CRITICAL RACE STUDIES
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on
Racism and Geography.” The Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002):
15-24.
Pulido, Laura. “Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism.”
Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 3 (2016): 1-16.
RACE AND THE ARCHIVE
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1-14.
Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery
[Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads.” Social Text 36, no. 4 (2018):
57-79.
Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data
Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature 85, no. 4 (2013):
661-688.
Wexler, Laura. “Seeing Sentiment: Photography, Race, and the Innocent
Eye.” In Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism,
52-93. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
NATIVE AMERICAN AND INDIGENOUS STUDIES
Byrd, Jodi A. “‘Been to the Nation, Lord, but I Couldn’t Stay There’:
American Indian Sovereignty, Cherokee Freedmen, and the
Incommensurability of the Internal.” Interventions 13, no. 1 (2011): 31-52.
Nakamura, Lisa. “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the
Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture.” American Quarterly 66, no.
4 (2014): 919-941.
DISABILITY STUDIES
Baynton, Douglas C. “Slaves, Immigrants, and Suffragists: The Uses of
Disability in Citizenship Debates.” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 562-567.
Kudlick, Catherine J. “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other.’”
American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003): 763-793.
Samuels, Ellen. “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where
Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet.” Signs 37, no. 1 (2011): 53-81.
Schweik, Susan. “Lomax’s Matrix: Disability, Solidarity, and the Black
Power of 504.” Disability Studies Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2011).
CRITICAL BORDER STUDIES
De León, Jason. “‘Better to Be Hot than Caught’: Excavating the
Conflicting Roles of Migrant Material Culture.” American Anthropologist
114, no. 3 (2012): 477-495.
Chávez, Karma R. “Border (In)Securities: Normative and Differential
Belonging in LGBTQ and Immigrant Rights Discourse.” Communication
and Critical/Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (2010): 136-155.