Spring 2008 SCA Course DescriptionsListed alphabetically by Course Title.
Introduction to Black Urban Studies | V18.0105 | 4 points Same as History V57.0090 Cities have played an important role throughout African history and have even been crucial to the way diasporic contexts are constituted: from the metropolises of Ancient Egypt and the urban centers of well-known west African civilizations (like Ghana, Mali, Songhai) to cities like Port-au-Prince, Havana, and Georgetown in the Caribbean. In attending to the way actors constitute wealth and power—in accounting for the way proximity structures interpersonal experiences—this course uses ethnographic, historical, and literary texts to theorize the Afrodiasporic city. We will explore the contours of these urban matrices through special attention to certain historical categories that, while problematic, prepare us to theorize the way Afrodiasporic populations have experienced history (e.g., the precolonial, the colonial, and the postcolonial). Overall though, instead of proceeding in a manner that is strictly chronological, students will consider the Afrodiasporic urban experience thematically, through a diverse array of readings. This course though will pay particular attention to the way urban contexts have shaped the historical experience of African-descended (or black) people in the U.S. (AF,MET) Language and Liberation: At Home in the Caribbean and Abroad | V18.0163 | 4 points Same as Linguistics V61.0026 The course explores the linguistic and cultural transformations which took place in the Commonwealth Caribbean from seventeenth century slavery and bond-servitude to the present-day. The focus is on the extent to which Caribbean people were given or demanded the freedom to create and maintain a post-colonial Caribbean identity. We first discuss the socio-historical conditions that led to the creation of new Caribbean languages called "pidgins" and "creoles" as the English language was transplanted from Britain and the United States. As far as possible, parallelisms are drawn to French and Spanish-influenced Caribbean communities. (AF) Latin@ Art and Performance in New York City | V18.0532 | 4 points Permission of Instructor required. This course looks at the history of Latina/o art and performance in the context of New York City. In particular, students will read Latina/o aesthetic practices within and against the social-political environment of their enactment. Latinos’ role in the continually redefined realm of hip hop, the extensive history of Latino contributions to the artistic vitality of the Lower East Side, and the theatrical production of Latino-specific community theaters represent a few of the areas that will be explored. Students will consider contemporary Latino art, and the institutions that support it, from the perspective of the changing Latino demographic of New York City. Furthermore, students will examine and analyze the specific ways that artists utilize the city as a site for artistic possibility. This course will bring together both an investigation of the the aesthetics of Latino performance and a investigation of democratic possibilities of urban space. In addition to the weekly seminar meeting, students will be required to attend several performances, visit art galleries, and execute a research project profiling a particular artist or institution. (LAT,MET) Latin@ Sexualities | V18.0536 | 4 points This course examines the study of sexuality as it pertains to the production and representation of Latina/o identities. Students will consider the integral roles scholarship and literature on/about Latino sexuality have played in the history of the broader U.S. feminist movement, feminist theory and GLBTQ studies. The course begins with the examination of classic Chicana feminist texts and the anthropological study of Latino sexual practices in light of their influential interventions to U.S. studies on gender and sexuality since the 1980s and early 1990s. Students will then explore more recent contributions by Latino scholars that trouble the simplistic ways in which Latina/o sexuality has been taken up as an exotic and radical departure from foundational work on sexuality. Students will engage sexuality in its plurality, examining multiple imaginings of Latina/o sexuality through fiction, performance theory, queer Latina/o critiques, and studies on emerging Latino masculinities. (GSS,LAT) MAP World Cultures: APA | V55.0539 | 4 points Recitation required. Asian Pacific America encompasses a complex, diverse, and rapidly changing population of people. This interdisciplinary course introduces students to major issues in the historical and contemporary experiences of Asian Pacific Americans, including migration, modernization, racial formation, community-building, political mobilization, among others. In this course we will pay particular attention to Asian Americans’ use of cultural productions—films, literature, art, media, and popular culture—as an expression/reflection of their cultural identities, historical conditions, and political efforts. Sponsored by MAP office. (APA, SCA) Modern America | V18.0798 Same as History V57.0010 Recitation Required. Main developments in American civilization since the end of the Civil War. Topics: urbanization; industrialization; American reform movements (populism, progressivism, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty); immigration; and the role of women and blacks in American history. Beginning with 19th-century American expansion through the Spanish-American War, traces the rise of America to world power, including World Wars I and II and the Cold War. Emphasizes broad themes and main changes in American society. (AM) New York City: A Social History | V18.0831 | 4 points Recitation required. Same as History V57.0639 Examines key themes in the social history of New York City: the pattern of its physical and population growth, its social structure and class relations, ethnic and racial groups, municipal government and politics, family and work life, and institutions of social welfare and public order. (MET) Reading Race and Representation | V18.0368 | 4 points Formerly V15.0603 Same as English V41.0058 Recitation required. Much contemporary public discourse characterizes race as a problem that some individuals “have,” or, even, a “card” that some people “play.” It is rarely recognized as a structural or material dimension that comprises everyday experience and knowledge. In this course, we will ask what it means to “read” race in objects, spaces, and events that for the most part do not seem to be “about” race per se. The course is organized around a series of such topics, which we will consider from an interdisciplinary perspective, engaging historical and legal texts, literature, and film, as well as scholarship from anthropology, sociology, and history. Over the course of the semester, we will address concepts and themes related to U.S. ethnic studies and critical race theory, including citizenship, rights, segregation, whiteness, colonialism, labor, migration, and alienness. The course provides an introduction to critical American studies as a field of scholarship that challenges our sense of the nation as socially and politically exceptional by asking what is forgotten or excluded in such a self-image. (AF,AM,APA,LAT,SCA) Research Methods in Metropolitan Studies | V18.0651 | 4 points Recitation required. Formerly V18.0020, V99.0501 Open to juniors and seniors only. Techniques of Social and Cultural Analysis. This course prepares students to study and theorize the social dynamics that define metropolitan contexts. In that effort, we consider the way people in urban spaces organize and contest authority, how they earn a living, and how they spend their free time. We will discuss the characteristics that define a “city” and what makes each one unique. Instead of limiting our inquiry to specific cities, though, we will consider a range of contexts where tensions emerge from efforts to manage resources amongst sizable populations. (MET,SCA) Seminar: African Cities: Medieval to Contemporary | V18.0794 Same as History V57.0598 (AF) Senior Research Seminar: Dangerous & Intermingled: Subaltern New York | V18.0090.003 | 4 points Permission of instructor (via email) and prior research experience required. Same as Gallatin K20-1480.001. In the world of moralists, intermingled New York has and still represents the epitome of danger and evil about the American experiment-the public intermixture of classes, genders, races, sexualities, spiritualisms, and devil knows what else!#? As elite Protestants created a refined European-affected "high brow" culture, they also created their "other"-a transgressive, lowly city of shadows, miscegenation, and impurity. The docks, the Bowery, the Five Points, Greenwich Village, LES/Loisaida, Chinatown, and Harlem were all forged against the repressed imaginings of the powerful and distinguished. This people's Gotham, this disdained intertwined underworld of music, slang, jokes, songs, stories, foodways, and marvels of people, from different cultures and subcultures seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, speaking/listening, and living amongst each other will be the focus of this advanced research seminar. Prior original research experience required. (SCA,APA, LAT, MET) Senior Research Seminar: Global Family Change & Sexual Politics | V18.0090.002 | 4 points This senior seminar is the capstone required course for graduating gender and sexuality majors. It will provide an opportunity to synthesize and apply cumulative knowledge to research on how the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race shapes distinctive local responses to the global reality of increasing family and sexual diversity. We will begin with three case studies of family diversity in the United States, South Africa and among an unusual ethnic minority culture (the Mosuo) in Southwestern China. The U.S. and South Africa represent almost opposite responses to same-sex marriage and polygamy, while the unique Mosuo matrilineal family system based on heterosexuality without marriage has become a lucrative tourist attraction. After a period of common reading, students will design individual or group research projects that explore conflicts over the changing meaning and value of marriage, parenthood, family or intimacy among members of diverse social and racial groups and sexualities in the US, South Africa, and/or China. (GSS,AFRI,AM,APA,SCA) Senior Research Seminar: The Urban Toilet | V18.0090.001 | 4 points Each student will write a research paper about public rest rooms. Projects can be based on any aspect: inequality/equality of access, architectural elements, sex and gender, uses and abuses, economic implications, comparative studies of toilets across cities in the world, or across historical time. The point is to use the public rest room as a vehicle for understanding larger social, political, and economic issues. Appropriate readings will be assigned. Students intending to take the seminar should attend the Saturday Nov 3 conference on public rest rooms at the Center for Architecture details attached. (MET,SCA) Sex, Gender, and Language | V18.0712 Same as Linguistics V61.0021 This course will examine gender from a multidisciplinary perspective and in particular as a sociolinguistic variable in speech behavior. How do linguistic practices both reflect and shape our gender identity and how these reflect more global socio-cultural relationships between the sexes? Do women and men talk differently? To what degree do these differences seem to be universal or variable across cultures? How do dominant gender-based ideologies function to constrain women's and men's choices about their gender identities and gender relationships? How does gendered language intersect with race and class-linked language? How is it challenged by linguistic "gender bending"? What impact does gendered language have on the power relationships in given societies? We will also, more briefly, examine gendered voices -- and silences -- in folklore and in literature, and in the new turn in life writing, such as that of academic women and in coming-out stories. Can language reform be instrumental in avoiding the downgrading of women? Finally, we will examine the constructionist argument that anatomy need not be linguistic destiny, that is, that, instead of assuming that women and men behave in certain ways linguistically, might we ask how particular linguistic practices contribute to the production of people as "women and men"? (GSS) Sex, Gender, and the Bible | V18.0743 Same as Religious Studies V90.0019 This course investigates a series of problems regarding the mutual constitution of male and female in the Hebrew Bible. Through close readings of a range of biblical texts (narrative, law, wisdom literature), we address such issues as the absence of the goddess in monotheism, the literary representation of women and men, the construction of gender ideals, and the legislation of sex and bodily purity. (GSS) Swahili II – Intro to | V18.0122 | 4 points Prerequisites: Intro to Swahili I HAKUNA MATATA. Building upon the basic concepts of communicative Swahili, this course moves one level higher. It reiterates and reinforces the basic concepts and adds more building blocks to introduce compound and complex structures. The skills hitherto attained are concretely expressed in short descriptive essays written in Swahili. (AF,SCA) Swahili II – Intermediate | V18.0124 | 4 points Prerequisites: Intro to Swahili I and II, Intermediate Swahili I. Intermediate Swahili 2 course is designed to equip the students with more practical skills in swahili.To achieve this, the course will have discussions,hold a swahili night,watch/listen to CDs,have writing and reading sessions as well as outdoor classes.This will help broaden the learners' vocabulary and at the same time experience the use of swahili in different life situations.In a nutshell, this course endeavours to make the students competent users of the language. (AF, SCA) Topics: 20th Century Literature: Culture/Policy/Art in Africa | V18.0715 Same as Comparative Literature V29.0190 (AF) Topics: Bodies, Cities, Texts | V18.0680-002 | 4 points Despite its deep commitment to material values Western culture has a deeply troubled relation with the matter that is flesh. Sex, violence, passions, and appetites, all associated with the alleged animality of ‘the body,’ have been constructed as subversive of civilization and social order while ‘mind’ has been constructed as their source. This ‘body trouble’ has been built into western cities and has had a profound effect on both the built environment and urban operations of power. The course investigates the kinds of corporeal order that have been considered necessary to make urban order possible in western cities from the classical Greek polis to the contemporary post-metropolis. There are two broad areas of investigation: 1) disciplinary knowledges and technologies directed towards the social body or urban populations as a whole—e.g., architecture and urban form, social policy, policing and surveillance, laws and regulations, and so forth; and 2) disciplinary regimes enacted by individuals and directed towards their own bodies in attempts to make them conform with, or transgress, regulatory norms regarding gender, sexuality, class, age, race/ethnicity, size and shape, etc.—e.g., diet, exercise, fashion and adornment, manners, gesture and comportment, patterns of consumption, surgical and genetic manipulation, hedonism and other practices intended to counter civilization’s repressive discontents. A continuing emphasis throughout the course will be the investigation of the increased corporeal vulnerability of groups identified as ‘body’ and as such subjected to exceptional disciplinary measures. These groups historically have included women, children, criminals, the masses, homosexuals, prostitutes, the insane, the infirm and unproductive, slaves, barbarians, the colonized, the nonwhite, the noneuropean, the immigrant. (MET,SCA) Topics in Caribbean Literature: Caribbean Literature and the Tempest | V18.0780 Same as Comparative Literature V29.0132 and English V41.0770 (AF) Topics: The Culture of Freedom: Quilombos, Palenques, & Maroon Societies in the Americas & Beyond | V18.0180-002 | 4 points Africans in the Americas had various ways of resisting slavery and oppression including work slowdowns, breaking of tools, destruction of crops and property, revolt and escape from captivity. This course, The Culture of Freedom, will discuss the important societies formed by self-liberated Africans including quilombos and mocambos in Brazil, palenques and cumbes in the Spanish speaking Americas, and maroon societies in the United States, South America and the Caribbean. It will also cover the little known siddi community of Northern Karnataka, India established by Africans fleeing enslavement in Goa. In addition to creating the first non-indigenous republics in the Americas, maroons gave us pioneering ideas about social responsibility and individual rights, concepts that are still operative in our social philosophy. Revolts and runaways also gave the Americas some exceptional leaders who are still celebrated, including Captain Sebastián Lemba in the Dominican Republic, Yanga in Mexico, King Zumbi in Brazil, King Benkos Bioho in Columbia, King Bayano in Panama, Queen Grandy Nanny and Captain Kojo in Jamaica, King Miguel Guacamaya in Venezuela, Makandal and Boukman in Haiti, and, although not as well known as the others, John Horse (aka Juan Caballo or Gopher John) in the United States and Mexico. Furthermore, we will investigate the numerous quilombos, palenques and maroon societies that still exist, as well as how their ubiquitous ideas are represented in all spheres of society from the arts to cyberspace. (AF) Topics: Harlem, Paris, and the New Negro | V18.0180-001 | 4 points This is a reading and lecture course on the florescence of African American culture and politics, centered in Harlem, New York and Paris, France, primarily between the world wars. (AF,MET) Topics: Medieval Misogyny | V18.0481-001 | 4 points Beginning with the biblical story of creation and moving through the powerful gendered tradition established by Saint Paul, this course will look at key texts of the Western Middle Ages (in modern English translation) in which men lay down the law, and occasionally, women talk back. Among other works we will take up the letters of Abelard and Heloise, the fictive but larger than life Wife of Bath, and the imagined feminine utopia of Christine de Pizan. (GSS) Topics: Transnational Feminism | V18.0493-002 | 4 points The world we live in is characterized by the ever-increasing mobility of capital, people, technology, culture and media across national borders; “globalization” has been used as the umbrella concept that describes this phenomenon. How does globalization shift the way in which we understand concepts of masculinity and femininity, sexuality and sexual identity, race and ethnicity? What kinds of travel, displacements and diasporas are engendered through globalization, and how are these movements linked to prior movements precipitated by earlier histories of colonialism, indentured labor and slavery? These questions of fixity and place, travel and tourism, labor and migration in a global context are all intimately linked to discourses of gender and sexuality. This course will explore how feminist scholars and activists, under the rubric of “transnational feminism,” have responded to the myriad ways in which globalization affects our experiences as gendered, sexual, raced and classed beings. We can thus understand transnational feminism as both a field of scholarship and an activist project, one that has emerged as a way of making sense of and responding to the reorganization of gender and sexuality in the context of globalization. (GSS, APA) Topics: Walking New York | V18.0680-001 | 4 points We walk through streets of New York often unaware of those who have walked and lived there before and how the street has changed. This seminar will explore the pastness of present sites to evoke the spirit of a place. We will learn how to read a street and its built environment at the same time as we try to uncover the history of the site (how and why it changed over time), identity visual remains and chart the changing and contested meanings of a place for its residents, neighbors and visitors. Each student will develop a walking tour of a neighborhood or theme and produce a paper with images that could be used by others to take the tour. (MET,SCA) Urban Economics | V18.0751 Same as Economics V31.0227 The city as an economic organization. Urbanization trends, functional specialization, and the nature of growth within the city; organization of economic activity within the city and its outlying areas, the organization of the labor market, and problems of urban poverty; the urban public economy; housing and land-use problems; transportation problems; and special problems within the public sector. (MET) Urban Environmentalism | V18.0631 | 4 points The course examines environmental issues facing people living in urban areas throughout the world. Focus ranges from the practical, "every day" realities of these issues to larger questions about the relationship between human society and the natural world. Using the analytic tools of ecology, biology, physics, sociology, economics, political science, philosophy, and geography, students will develop a theoretical framework for understanding environmental problems. The goal is to develop sophisticated, critical research and conceptual skills. Students will learn how social structures and institutions shape the way that humans interact with natural systems, how the form of these structures and institutions has enabled or prevented what are commonly known as "environmental problems" in metropolitan areas, historically and today. To do this will require thinking about "social structures and institutions", “natural systems” and "the urban" in the first place - this too will be part of the course. This is a demanding course with a heavy reading load and high expectations about student performance. (MET,SCA) Writing New York | V18.0757 Same as English V41.0180 Recitation Required An introduction to the history of New York through an exploration of fiction, poetry, plays, and films about the city, from Washington Irving’s A History of New York to Frank Miller’s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. Two lectures and one recitation section each week. (MET) |
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