Time: Wednesdays, 4.00-6.40 pm Place: Room 1108 Holzapfel Hall
Course Description
AMST 603 is the second half of a two-course sequence (with AMST
601) required of Ph.D. students in the department.
AMST 601 "traces the history of American Studies as an academic
enterprise and the contexts--intellectual, cultural, and political--
that have shaped it." AMST 603 aims to make students conversant with
issues resonating in American Studies scholarship currently and to
familiarize them with a set of theories and methods scholars are finding
promising for investigating those issues.
The course will be organized as a seminar and will include a wired component
to make students acquainted with the potential resources the World Wide Web
makes available for research and teaching in American Studies. We will begin
by reviewing a few fundamental concepts and ideas: post-structuralism
and post-modernism, theories of racial formation, post-colonial studies,
border studies, and queer theory. We will then sample a range of
scholarship that builds
on, invokes, supplements, or complicates these ideas, including
investigations of identity and difference, Black feminist
thought, transnational studies,
constructions of Whiteness, disability studies, globalization and
internationalization
issues, public advocacy, public history, and studies that examine the
intersections between class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Our main task in AMST 603 will be to work through and reflect upon an
intriguing if challenging set of readings. Class meetings will be structured
to be as participatory as possible. Each student will have the
opportunity to tweak the syllabus by presenting a work that
complements, contradicts, or critiques the other texts. Students will
keep a reading
journal, develop an autobiographical statement, and prepare a graduate level
syllabus that integrates the recent scholarship into a course in their
primary area of interest. The assignment will include an essay discussing
the form and logic of the course and an online syllabus. All students in
the class are required to have GLUE and OTAL accounts and will build their
own Websites over the course of the semester.
Course Requirements
Students will complete weekly reading assignments, contribute weekly to
seminar discussions, occasionally help frame seminar discussions, present
an
autobiographical statement, present one supplementary resource to the
class, keep a weekly reading journal, develop a
simple Webpage for classwork, and prepare a syllabus (with commentary)
which will be presented on the Webpage.
Weekly Participation
in Discussions: Seminars are collective enterprises; they require
everyone's engagement and participation to succeed. You should come to
class prepared to contribute to each week's discussion of the readings.
Good discussions can only be built when a critical mass of class members
have not only read but reflected on the week's texts. Please give
yourself enough time for reflection.
Often, we will begin each
session by eliciting everyone's sense of the books' or articles' major
arguments, research approaches, and contributions
During each class we will attempt to
analyze the readings until we comprehend how the authors have framed their
questions, what promise they offer for thinking about issues currently
resonating in American Studies, and how well the arguments or research
programs have been executed. Part of our task will involve demystifying
the ways scholars talk about their issues, translating their arguments
when necessary, and assessing the suggestiveness of their ideas. Please
come to class with a couple of comments and a couple of questions to
contribute.
On Framing Seminar Discussions: Students will sign up
to help frame seminar discussions once during the semester. When
scheduled, your job will include presenting a brief assessment of
the readings and developing a set of discussion questions to help the
class grasp and work through the key issues or concepts in the texts.
Please prepare a handout for distribution to everyone. Different texts
inspire different kinds of discussions. For some
readings, you may wish to focus on difficult or obscure passages or
concepts and enlist everyone's help in working through them. For others,
you might provide a critical evaluation of the work's
purpose, scope, theoretical framework, methods, and major arguments. In
other cases, you may wish simply to frame questions that will help us
think about the strengths and weaknesses or controversial points raised.
In all cases, YOUR JOB IS NOT TO RECAPITULATE THE CONTENT
OF THE TEXTS AT LENGTH. If you are stumped by a set of readings (this
happens--it's OK!), feel free to take advantage of my office hours, or to
use your questions as the starting point for discussion of the texts.
Autobiographical Statement: Each student will prepare an
autobiographical statement of approximately 10 minutes to be presented
to the class. The purpose of this exercise is to ask everyone to reflect
upon her relationship with her scholarship and to situate herself
intellectually, politically, and personally. The logic of this exercise
will become apparent as we explore the extent to which current approaches
to American studies start from a position of identity politics. The
exercise is designed to ask each scholar to think about his relationship
to his work and to reflect upon the role of identity politics in his and
others' scholarship.
Weekly Reading Journal: Each student
will be assigned to keep a weekly reading journal. Journals should be
fairly formal documents (typed and proofread) in which you reflect upon
and respond to major points raised in each week's reading assignments.
Use your journal to engage with the texts, to help you digest the ideas
presented therein, to make these concepts your own, reject them (with
cause), relate them to other ideas or scholarly sources you know, or
otherwise make sense of them in some way. Write your journal for
yourself and aim to have, at the end of the semester, a document
that records the gist of key readings and your response to
them--something you can use in future when you are studying for
comps or reviewing texts for teaching or research. Journals will be
collected every three to four weeks.
Class Webpage: Toward
early March
we will begin building a class Website. This will consist of an
online syllabus and a series of linked pages belonging to every student in
the class. Information Technology (IT) already plays a strong role in our
field and everyone intending to pursue scholarship in American Studies,
whether in academe or public history or cultural resource settings, needs
to be familiar with IT-related resources and skills. By the end of the
semester, you will know how to create your own basic Web site.
We
will build our Websites incrementally through four assignments: a basic
Webpage providing a brief identification of your interests and areas of
expertise, an annotated bibliography of five Websites that you have
identified that offer resources in your areas of interest, an annotated
bibliography of five key texts that you plan to use for your syllabus
project, and the final syllabus project itself. A workshop providing
instruction in basic and intermediate html will be arranged for those
needing it. Please consult the course calendar for due dates for each
component of the Website.
Syllabus Project: The largest
written project of the semester will be the syllabus project. Your task
is to develop a syllabus for a graduate level course in whatever you
consider to be your main area(s) of emphasis in American Studies or a
related field. It goes
without saying that your course should be interdisciplinary. And it
should be up to date--that is, it should incorporate at least some of the
current approaches in American Studies that we've been studying all
semester. The project will have two components: the syllabus itself
(which will be mounted on your website) and an essay providing a tour of
your syllabus, a rationale for why you have shaped it in this particular
way, a discussion of what role(s) the "current approaches" play in your
course, and an assessment of the course's strengths, weaknesses,
challenges, and irritations.
Course Readings
Books are available for purchase at Vertigo Books.
Two copies of articles or book chapters will be available "on reserve" in
the
coffee room, 1116 Holzapfel. Please sign out articles for copying and
return them
within two hours.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United
States,
1994.
Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built, 1998.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 2nd edition, 2000.
Edward Said, Orientalism, 1979
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1967
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 1998
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 1998
Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique,
2003.
Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place, 1995
Clyde Woods, Development Arrested, 1998
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 2000.
