SPRING 2001
This information effective for Spring 2001.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Instructor: Terry P. Wilson
Classroom: College 8, Rm. 242
Class Time: MW 5:00 - 6:45pm
Provides a critical examination of various disciplinary approaches and paradigms addressing issues in the history and theory of race, ethnicity, and interethnic and interracial relations in the United States. These will be compared and contrasted to literary, cinematic, and folk concepts.
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Requirements: |
Participation in Class Discussion |
40% |
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Term Paper (15 -18 pp.) |
40% |
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Oral Presentation of Papers |
20% |
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Mar 28, Wed |
Discussion: Race and Ethnicity: |
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Apr 2, Mon |
Discussion: Establishing the "Other" in U.S. History |
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Apr 4, Wed |
Discussion: American Indians/Indian Americans |
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Apr 9, Mon |
Discussion: Finding "Others" in Other Places |
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Apr 11, Wed |
Discussion: A Melting Pot of Metaphors |
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Apr 16, Mon |
Discussion: Ethnic Pluralism |
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Apr 18, Wed |
Discussion: A Question of Class |
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Apr 23, Mon |
Discussion: Considering Whiteness, I |
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Apr 25, Wed |
Discussion: Considering Whiteness, II |
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Apr 30, Mon |
Discussion: Considering Whiteness, III |
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May 2, Wed |
Discussion: Fun with Paradigms |
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May 7, Mon |
Discussion: Raciality and Racism Issues |
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May 9, Wed |
Discussion: Looking Back and Looking Forward |
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May 14, Mon |
Discussion: Beyond Racial Categories |
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May 16, Wed |
Discussion: Historical Multiracial Issues |
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May 21, Mon |
Film: The Fringe Dwellers |
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May 23, Wed |
Discussion: Growing Up Multiracial |
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May 28, Mon |
Holiday |
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May 30, Wed |
Oral Presentation of Papers |
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June 7, Thurs.,12noon-3pm |
Final Examination Period |
Instructor: Brij Lunine
Spring 2001
Lecture & Film Screenings: Merrill 102
Mondays 5-6:45, 7-8:10, Wednesdays 5-6:45
Office: Kresge 218, hours TBA
459-4504, e-mail: brij43@cats.ucsc.edu
Teaching Assistants: Apryl Berney & Kevin Fellezs
This course is a survey of major popular cultural forms, with attention to social and historical context and especially theories of analysis. We will cover popular culture in the United States starting with roughly the 1920s and continuing to the present. The course focuses on how gender, race, class, and sexuality are constructed in representations and how representations reflect the historical context. The approach is fairly systematic in that we will cover texts and forms which are producing and attempting to define a national culture while considering texts and representations which are systematically excluded. The course will introduce students to the major forms of American popular culture which have emerged in the 20th century and will provide students with an understanding of the theoretical strategies used to make sense of these forms. We will start by following a rough chronological approach; but in order to examine different cultures, media, and popular forms, certain topics and phenomena will be examined within their own historical trajectories.
Texts are available for sale at the Literary Guillotine, 204 Locust Ave., downtown Santa Cruz. They will also be on one day reserve at McHenry Library (including the reader). In addition, the course reader is for sale at Slug Books [next to 7-11 on High Street]. All assigned films are on reserve in the Media Center, first floor, McHenry Library.
Regular attendance and participation in discussion sections is required. Three or more absences from lectures or sections will jeopardize your ability to pass the course. Beyond merely showing up to section (with the text to be discussed), you need to come having read all of the assigned reading, with notes and ideas ready to share. Please come with a question or issue you have identified (or more than one) from the reading and lecture that you would like to discuss.
Response papers, 1 mid term paper 5-7 pages, and a 15 page research paperOR
Expect quizzes on the readings; two analytical papers, 5-7 pages in length, detailed instructions and topics will be provided; and additional reading response writing in your sections.
If you are having problems that will jeopardize your ability to pass this course, please see me. Also I enforce the University's New Policy on Academic Dishonesty, Navigator: Undergraduate Handbook 2000-2001, Appendix pages 63-65.
Your time requirement for this course is conceived as follows: this is a five unit course; the expectation is fifteen hours spent per week on it. There are roughly 3 1/2 hours spent in class, plus several hours screening films and attending section; that leaves roughly 8 hours for reading, writing, and contemplating. If you are spending significantly more time than this and are unhappy, please see me. If you are spending less time that this, please see me immediately.
Syllabus (subject to change)
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Wednesday, 28 March |
Introduction: Course overview, distribute syllabus, organize sections. |
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Monday, 2 April
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Theories and approaches. Read: Course reader [CR]: Carla Freccero, excerpts from Popular Culture: An Introduction, Chapters 1 & 2, "Popular Culture: An Introduction," "Cultural Studies, Popular Culture and Pedagogy," and Raymond Williams, Keywords, "Culture," "Democracy," "Folk," "Masses," & "Popular." Screen: Marlon Riggs, "Ethnic Notions," (1987) |
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Wednesday, 4 April |
Theories and approaches (continued). Read: CR: Leslie T. Good, "Power, Hegemony, and Communication Theory," Sut Jhally, "The Political Economy of Culture," Stuart Hall, "Notes on Deconstructing 'the Popular.'" |
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Monday, 9 April |
Race and representation from the beginning - "Birth of a Nation" (1913). Read: CR: Rogin, "'The Sword Became a Flashing Vision': D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation." Screen: "Birth of a Nation" (clips). |
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Wednesday, 11 April |
Alternative visions - Oscar Micheaux. Read: CR: Thomas Cripps, "Oscar Micheaux: The Story Continues," Jane Gaines, "Fire and Desire: Race, Melodrama and Oscar Micheaux," J. Ronald Green, "'Twoness' in the Style of Oscar Micheaux." |
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Monday, 16 April |
Chicano Trajectories. The border - histories, popular representations and avant-garde conceptualizations. Read: Fox, The Fence and the River (1999). Intro, chapters 1-3. Screen: Guillermo Gómez-Peña. "Border
Brujo," (1990) |
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Wednesday, 18 April |
Read: Fox chapters 4 & 5. Screen: Jim Mendiola, "Pretty Vacant" (1996). |
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Monday, 23 April |
Continuing the history of Chicanos in early American film. Read: CR: José E. Limón, "Stereotyping and Chicano Resistance: An Historical Dimension," Antonio Ríos-Bustamante, "Latino Participation in the Hollywood Film Industry, 1911-1945," Charles Ramírez Berg, "Bordertown, the Assimilation Narrative, and the Chicano Social Problem Film." Screen: Barry Nye, "Yo Soy Chicano" (1972) |
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Wednesday, 25 April |
Chicano Film. Read: CR: Rosa Linda Fregoso, excerpts from The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture, Introduction, "The Bronze Screen: Looking at Us Looking," and "Actos of Imaginative Re-discovery." |
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Monday, 30 April |
The emergence of television. Read: CR: John Storey, "Television," George Lipsitz, "The Meaning of Memory: Family, Class and Ethnicity in Early Network Television." Screen: Marlon Riggs, "Color Adjustment" (1991) |
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Wednesday, 2 May |
Read: CR: Michael Omi, "In Living Color: Race and American Culture." Andrea Press, "Work, Family, and Social Class in Televised Images of Women: Prefeminism, Feminism, and Postfeminism on Prime-Time Television." |
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Monday, 7 May |
TV's ideological effects. Read: Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream, 1992, chapters 1-4. |
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Wednesday, 9 May |
Read: Jhally and Lewis, chapters 5-8. |
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Monday, 14 May |
Advertising. Read: CR: Stuart Ewen, "Advertising and the Development of Consumer Society," Sut Jhally, "Advertising as Religion: The Dialectic of Technology and Magic," Stephen Kline, "Limits to the Imagination: Marketing and Children's Culture." |
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Wednesday, 16 May |
The Nike Paradigm. Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, excerpt from Nike Culture: The Sign of the Swoosh, "Just Metacommunicate It," Sarah Terry, "Getting to Know You." |
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Monday, 21 May |
MTV and an overview of Feminism(s) and popular culture. Dominic Strinati, "Feminism and Popular Culture," Lawrence Grossberg, "MTV: Swinging on the (Postmodern) Star." Screen: Sut Jhally, "Dreamworlds" (1990) & "Dreamworlds 2" (1995) |
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Wednesday, 23 May |
MTV, music and the industry. Read: CR: Robert Christgau, "Rah, Rah, Sis-Boom-Bah: The Secret Relationship Between College Rock and the Communist Party, Joanne Gottlieb and Gayle Wald, "Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock," Lawrence Grossberg, "Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care?: On Talking about 'The State of Rock,'" Robert Walser, Highbrow, Lowbrow, Voodoo Aesthetics." |
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Monday, 28 May |
Hip-Hop Cultures 1970s to present. Read: CR: Neva Chonin, "Turning the Tables: How the Invisibl Skratch Piklz became the world's most lauded DJ Crew," Brian Cross, excerpts from It's Not About A Salary...: Rap, Race + Resistance in Los Angeles: "Preface," "L. A. Hiphop: A Brief History," and Raegan Kelley, "Hiphop Chicano: A Separate But Parallel Story," Juan Flores, "Puerto Rican and Proud, Boyee!: Rap Roots and Amnesia." |
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Wednesday, 30 May |
Jefferey Louis Decker, "The State of Rap: Time and Place in Hip Hop Nationalism," Tricia Rose, "A Style Nobody Can Deal With: Politics, Style and the Postindustrial City in Hip Hop." Popular culture and history. A look back over the last eighty years, final wrap-up and discussion. |
Instructor: Donald H. Matthews, M.A., MDIV, Ph.D.
Sexuality has long been a site of oppression and fulfillment for African American people. Historically, the desire to control the sexual practices of African Americans has been of interest to American slave holders during colonial and ante-bellum eras. This control was so exacting in the United States that the great intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois stated that the black family was established later than the black church as a viable institution in the black community. Since the beginning of their lives in the Americas, African Americans have struggled to define the terms of their own sexuality. The sexual oppression of blacks has been the focus of many literary works and social scientific studies from the depictions of sexual exploitations in the slave narratives to Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize novel Beloved.
This interest in black sexuality has not just been the focus of historical times. Modern investigators such as Moynihan, Murray, Becker, and Wilson have made the sexual practices of blacks an important phenomenon in their development of public policy. The media has also sought to gain public viewership through sexual and asexual depictions of black life. The black community finds itself in a fishbowl in which its sexually is continually exploited, admired, and feared.
This course will examine the history of black sexuality in the United States. We will use historical studies, literary narratives, and social scientific investigations to develop a view of black sexuality that encompasses its various practices and attitudes, including units on homosexuality, sexual abuse, and sexual practices in the black community.
Assignments: Two five-page papers on the readings. Project/paper on a topic of black sexuality.
Week One: West African Kinship Systems
Week Two: Early Sexual Contact - Africa and Europe
Week Three: African-European Sexuality under Capitalist Expansion
Week Four: African Sexuality and the Plantation System
Week Five: The Black Family in Freedom
Week Six: Urbanization and Black Sexual Practices
Week Seven: Sexuality and the Black Male
Week Eight: Sexuality and the Black Women
Week Nine: Black Sexuality and the Media
Week Ten: Black Sexuality and Social Policy