WINTER 2000
This information effective for Winter 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
WINTER 2000
This information effective for Winter 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Lane,
Winter 2000
This is a foundation course in American Studies. Alternatively, it can be used to satisfy the program's international requirement or historical sequence requirement (when paired with AS 114A).
Non-American Studies majors are also welcome. Email amlane@cats.ucsc.edu if you have difficulty enrolling.
Coure readings will include selections from Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Ronald Takaki, Saskia Sassen, Manning Marable, Ward Churchill, and others. We will examine past and present social movements in the U.S. as well as technological and economic transformations.
Requirements include several brief exposition papers, a 15-20 page final paper, and in-class presentation.
Professor: Curtis Márez
Focusing on a variety of cultural forms, including testimonios, captivity narratives, (auto)biography, literature, music, film, painting, and photography, we will consider the limits and possibilities of an interdisciplinary Chicana/o Cultural Studies. While we will take up a host of topics, three broad categories will organize our investigations: Chicana/o history and historiography; gender and sexuality; and class and labor. Since some of the most exciting recent work in Chicana/o Cultural Studies engages periods prior to the 1960s and 1970s codification of the term(s) Chicana/o, it raises complex historiographical questions. Can we speak of a Chicana/o Cultural Studies method that can be applied to earlier historical moments? Is it useful to think of pre-, proto- or neo-Chicanas and Chicanos, or do new cultural histories require new concepts and periodizations? Similarly, we will consider the ways in which questions of gender and sexuality challenge and cut across a variety of topics and disciplines. Complementing our historical focus, we will historicize Chicana/o genders and sexualities and consider challenges that these concepts raise for periodization. What are the continuities and breaks between past and present gender and sex systems? Can we speak of brown "heteronormativity" or "queerness" across time, or are prior organizations of affect and desire irreducible to such concepts? How might the study of historical continuities and breaks help us bring into focus the specificity of contemporary gender/sex discourses and practices? Finally, we will consider class and labor, from the nineteenth century to the present. While we will study contexts and cases that are manifestly "about" these topics, including labor histories, movements, and cultural productions, we will also look for the influence of class and labor relations where it is less apparent. How do labor relations inform representations of scenes and contexts other than sites of production? How does class inflect other forms of identity such as race, gender, and sexuality? How have deindustrialization and globalization transformed contemporary cultural production?
A note on course requirements: This interdisciplinary course should be of interest to students working in a variety of fields. I will thus tailor paper assignments to meet students' needs. In preparation for a field exam or dissertation prospectus, some may wish to write a paper that surveys scholarship on a particular topic. Others may wish to pursue more focused research projects. I would especially welcome students who ultimately plan to engage in some sort of fieldwork or archival research that fits within the broad scope of the course.
Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846
Genaro Padilla, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography
Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios
Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier
Martina Diaz, deposition concerning her captivity among the Comanches, Depredations on the Frontiers of Texas
Andres Martinez, Andele, or The Mexican-Kiowa Captive, as told to J.J. Methvin
Geronimo, "The Mexicans," Geronimo: His Own Story, as told to S.M. Barrett
Various narratives concerning Refugio G. Martinez, captive among the Apache, 1858-1864
Miscellaneous Indian and Mexican captivity narratives, W.P.A. archives
Narrative of "Carrying Her Sunshade," Mexican captive among the Comanche,
John Rollin Ridge, Joaquin Murieta
Michael Denning, "Migrant Narratives" and "Black Jacobins, Native Sons, and the Mexican Border: Race, Nation, and Fascism," The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (selections)
Camille Guerin-Gonzales, Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939 (selections)
Vicki L. Ruiz, "With Pickets, Baskets, and Ballots," From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America
The Life Story of the Mexican Immigrant: Autobiographic Documents Collected by Manuel Gamio (selections)
Reserve Film: The Salt of the Earth
Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of All Things Mexican: Cultural Relations Between the United States and Mexico (selections)
Douglas Monroy, "'Our Children Get So Different Here': Parents and Children in Mexico de Afuera"
Lydia Mendoza: A Family Autobiography (selections)
George J. Sánchez, "Familiar Sounds of Change: Music and the Growth of Mass Culture," Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angles, 1900-1945
Vicki L. Ruiz, "The Flapper and the Chaperone," From Out of the Shadows
Reserve Listening: Selected songs by Lydia Mendoza, Juanita and María Mendoza, and others
Norma Alarcón, "Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of 'The' Native Woman"
Arturo Islas, The Rain God
Cherrie Moraga, "Queer Aztlan," The Last Generation
José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race (selections)
Luis Valdez, "La Plebe," Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature
Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation, eds. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano (selections)
Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master's House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibit (selections)
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, "Laying it Bare: The Queer/Colored Body in Photography by Laura Aguilar," Living Chicana Theory
From the West: Chicano Narrative Photography, catalogue for an exhibition curated by Chon A. Noriega, Mexican Museum, San Francisco
In preparation for this meeting we will take a field trip to Stanford to view photos by Laura Aguilar, Harry Gamboa, and Miguel Gandert,
Jose Munoz, Disidentification: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (selections)
Rosa Linda Fregoso, "Re-Imaging Chicana Urban Identities in the Public Sphere, Cool Chuca Style"
Néstor Garcia Canclini, Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture in Mexico (selections)
José David Saldívar, "On the Bad Edge of La Frontera" and "Frontejas to El Vez," Border Matters
George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (selections)
Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, "Founding Statement"
Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, "Introduction," The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital
José Rabasa, "Of Zapatismo: Reflections on the Folkloric and the Impossible in a Subaltern Insurrection"
Aihwa Ong, "The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity"
Music Video: Rage Against the Machine, "People of the Sun"
José David Saldívar, "Cultural Theory in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands," Border Matters
Norma Alarcón, Caren Kaplan, and Minoo Moallem, "Between Woman and Nation," Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State
Norma Alarcón, "Conjugating Subjects: The Heteroglossia of Essence and Resistance"
Juan Bruce-Novoa, "Shipwrecked in the Seas of Signification: Cabeza de Vaca's La Relación and Chicano Literature"
José Limon, "Emergent Postmodern Mexicano"