Winter 2004

This information effective for Winter 2004. Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.

American Studies

[AMST-104B] [AMST-125A]

104B. Labor and the Working Class

MW 5:00–6:45 p.m., 240 College Eight
Instructor: George Lipsitz

Course Description:

Labor and the working class is a course about working people in the United States from 1919 to the present—their cultures, conflicts, institutions, and social movements. From Sit-Down Strikes to Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns, from Fordism to Flexible Accumulation, from the New Deal to Neo-liberalism, we will examine the experiences and aspirations of people who work for wages under conditions they do not completely control. This course places a special emphasis on working class culture—on popular music, literature, visual art, fashion, film, and fiction as interpretive frames about and active interventions into the lives of workers and the broader society around them. We will explore how class categories have shaped the meaning of social identities—of race, gender, and sexuality; and we will examine how people's lives as producers reflect and inflect their worlds as citizens and consumers. The globe migrations that have produced the U.S. working class make this national history also a history of transnationalism, and the current worldwide division of labor makes it necessary for us to examine the relationships among different cohorts of workers in the U.S. and around the world. Readings will include works by a variety of intellectuals, activists, and artists including Robin D. G. Kelley, Vicki Ruiz, Grace Lee Boggs, Mirian Ching Yoon Louis, Stan Weir, Pietro di Donato, Edna Bonacich, Lizabeth Cohen, and many others.

The American Studies Department is excited to introduce Professor George Lipsitz. Professor Lipsitz has recently joined the American Studies faculty from U.C. San Diego where he served as the Director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute. His research interests include Race, Culture, and Social Identities; Twentieth-Century U.S. History; Urban History and Culture; and Social Movements. He is also the author of several prominent works in the field of American studies including American Studies in a Moment of Danger and The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. He will be teaching three courses during the 2003-2004 academic year: for undergraduates Labor and the Working Class (Winter 2004) and Aspects of African-American Culture (Spring 2004), and for graduate students Tradition and Modernity in Black Culture (Spring 2004).

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125A. Aspects of African American Culture: Black Women Writers and their Literary Re-imaginings of Race and Gender

New Course!

MWF 2-3:10 p.m., 131 Cowell College
Instructor: Kathy Glass
Course Call Number: 39444

Course Description:

What social and political purpose did literature serve for nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American women? How did they record their versions of reality and visions of a democratic future? How did they strive to recreate their realities through the power of the spoken word? Problematizing and historicizing the concept of African American literature, this course examines the writings, sermons, and speeches of black women whose cultural productions are inseparable from their social activism. After considering "traditional" representations of black women through film, this course will examine the process whereby black women's literature interrogated and re-imagined conventional concepts of race and gender underpinning the national community. We will also examine how the literary works of early black writers analyzed the role of race within feminist struggles and the importance of gender matters within anti-racist politics.

Required texts will include works by Toni Morrison, Ida B. Wells, Pauline Hopkins, and Frances Harper as well as films such as the following: And Still I Rise, Ethnic Notions, and Gone with the Wind.

Glass has just completed her doctoral dissertation on African American literature. In her research she examines how black women in the nineteenth century used the written and the spoken word to transform the society in which they lived. Glass views literature as a powerful tool that can help us to explore, re-imagine, and change the world in which we live.