AMST Courses
Core Courses
AMST 201: Major Works for American Studies.
A small lecture course enrolling between 35 and 60 students, AMST 201 offers students significant texts or works of American culture in a variety of media - printed, graphic, artifactual, material, and oral. Although one faculty member will teach the course, guest lecturers from various disciplines may contribute as well. The goal of this course is to explore what kinds of insights and syntheses result from juxtaposing works across disciplinary boundaries and from different methodological perspectives.
AMST 301-302: Introduction to the American Studies Major
A year-long sequence of two small seminars, this course will introduce majors both to the history of American Studies and to various theories and methods for the practice of American Studies. The three goals of these seminars are (1) to make students aware of their own interpretive practices; (2) to gain information and conceptual tools needed for advanced work in American Studies; and (3) to provide comparative approaches to the study of various aspects of the United States.
AMST 303: American Studies Theory
AMST 303 is designed to introduce American Studies majors to major theorists and theoretical ideas likely to be useful to them in their course work.
AMST 401: Fourth-Year Seminar in American Studies
This seminar is intended to focus study, research, and discussion on a single period, topic, or issue, such as the Great Awakening, the Salem Witchcraft Trials, the Civil War, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, or the 1960s. Topics will vary.
AMST 493: Independent Study in American Studies.
Topics vary, and must be approved by the program director. Students will work with individual AMST faculty and meet weekly to discuss methodology, subject matter, and research methods.
CURRENT OFFERINGS (Fall 2008):
AMST 201: Asian American Cultural History, Sylvia Chong
The historical experiences of Asian Americans-a broad, panethnic category inclusive of Americans with roots in the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, North and South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and more-shed light on issues of immigration, citizenship, education, war, labor, and assimilation which have affected all Americans to differing degrees. This "multi-media" cultural history will draw heavily on American visual and popular culture to situate, visualize, and define Asian Americans at various historical moments against and alongside African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and white Americans. Some of these moments involve intense conflict and division, while others gesture towards camaraderie and affiliation. This class will be neither a simplistic celebration of ethnic pride and diversity, nor a condemnation of American history as singularly oppressive, although we will acknowledge both these strands. Rather, the eclectic materials of this class will replicate the heterogeneous history and make-up of Asian America, and establish Asian America as a relationship with itself and with America, rather than a "thing" to isolate and analyze.
This is an introductory course that assumes no prior knowledge of American Studies or Asian American history. During the semester, we will concentrate on developing close reading skills for visual, cinematic and textual materials that may prove useful to future courses you might take in American Studies, History, English or Media Studies. We will engage with a number of primary texts from various genres (fiction, poetry, graphic novel, political cartoon, theater, narrative film, documentary, news media, sociological texts, Supreme Court cases), and spanning the mid-19th century to contemporary times. While obviously not an exhaustive overview of Asian Americans in American cultural history, we will try to touch upon a diverse range of historical moments and cultural and political issues, so as to gain insight into the interconnectedness of multi-ethnic America.
Preference for AMST 201 will be given to first- and second-years, and to potential AMST majors and APAS minors, although others are welcome to enroll if space is available. This course is cross-listed as ENMC 355 (20 additional spaces).
AMST 201: Major Works for American Studies
MW 1400-1515 CAB 332
MWF 1000-1050 CAB 324
AMST 201: The Global South, Eric Lott
TR 1400-1515 CAB 324
Following the lead of the "new southern studies," this course will introduce you to the practice of American Studies by remapping the South from cotton belt to sun belt and beyond. We'll consider the region in three conceptual frames: as a sub-national section with a distinctive, historically changing politicaleconomy(antebellum chattel slavery, postbellum debt peonage, post-Fordist neoliberalism) and cultural history; as the northern part of a
hemispheric South that includes the Caribbean and Latin America; and as a key component in what has come to be called the global South-that low-wage losing player in today's international division of labor, perhaps best keynoted by that Bastard Out of Arkansas, Wal-Mart. This is all obviously a
tall order, and we'll only be able to chart certain genealogies of cultural-political thought and struggle. But among other things, I'd like
to take up the idea of southern exceptionalism or what used to be called the "mind" of the South and certain of its cultural expressions (e.g., the
plantation romance, the slave narrative, the rape-lynching nexus, Faulkner, Hurston, the blues, Deliverance, Dorothy Allison, Outkast); the U.S. South's
various and extensive cultural-political relations with its southern neighbors (e.g., the Mexican War, Jose Marti and the "Spanish-American War,"
U.S. military involvement in Haiti, post-Cuban Revolution Havana and Miami, Russell Banks's Continental Drift, Faulkner's influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul's A Turn in the South, the invention of the Caribbean steel drum out of U.S. oil drums, reggae's transformation of American R&B,
Derek Walcott's Arkansas Testament); and the place and role of the U.S. South in a global North-South divide (e.g., African agricultural practices
in slave-owning South Carolina, Richard Wright's reporting in The Color Curtain on the 1955 Bandung conference of non-aligned nations, post-1965
Asian immigration to states like Virginia, Mira Nair's Mississippi Masala, "Toyotization" in North Carolina auto plants, the sweated labor behind and
cultural influence of Wal-Mart).
AMST 201: Copyright, Commerce, and Culture, Siva Vaidhyanathan
TR 1530-1645 CLK 107
In media worlds, just about everything is regulated by the global copyright system. It is essential to understanding the rights and responsibilities of artists, producers, networks, citizens, and consumers. In this course, we will discuss one of the most powerful social, cultural, economic and political institutions of our day: copyright law. How did we arrive at the notion that creative works and ideas can be owned, bought and sold like tangible commodities? What impact does this concept have on the way we view the world? How does it help us achieve our social goals, and how does it present obstacles to reaching those goals? And, in the age of digitized information and networked communication, how can we understand the role of copyright in light of the rapidly changing developments in the way culture is produced and consumed? This class will explore various social, cultural, legal, and political issues that have arisen in recent years as a result of new communicative technologies. The two main technological changes that will concern us are the digitization of information and culture and the rise of networks within society and politics. Each student will gain a familiarity with the perspectives and vocabulary surrounding these issues. And each student will learn to research, argue, and write about the controversies that have dominated technological discussions. We will examine sociological, historical, and legal scholarship to provide a foundation in the major themes of the emerging field of “Critical Information Studies.”
AMST 301: American Studies Seminar (Part I)
TR 1100-1215 CLM 322B, Anna Brickhouse
TR 1230-1345 CLM 322B
AMST 401: Documentary Film and Am Folk Rev, Grace Hale
R 1400-1630 CLM 322B
AMST 401 Hollywood Film and American Culture, Carmenita Higginbotham
MW 1300-1530 CLM 201
Hollywood, Film and American Culture: The 1930s. This course examines American cinema produced in Hollywood during the 1930s.
While the Great Depression serves as an important backdrop to our investigation, we will interrogate how issues such as ethnic/racial
representation, shifting gender roles, sexuality, and urbanity are mediated in popular cinema in this decade. In addition to film, we also will
consider extra-textual sources and other aspects influential to the film industry such as the studio system, the Hayes Code, stardom, and changes
within narrative and film techniques. Requirements for this course include two short response essays and a 15-20-page research paper.
AMST 401: Latino Film and Social Narrative, Daniel Chavez
W 1300-1530 CLM 322A
AMST 401: Orientalism and US War Film, Sylvia Chong
TR 1400-1515 BRN 334
The concept of "American Orientalism" describes how America social scientists and policy makers defined and racialized Asians in
the 20th-century so as to produce an opposition between the "East" and the "West"--a binary that both complements and disturbs the usual
black-white opposition of American race relations. Although Orientalism in Europe was largely a product of colonization in Asia
and Africa, American Orientalism has a stronger relationship to Asian immigration to America, as well as to America's numerous wars in the
Orient. This class will examine the issue of race and American Orientalism through the war film-films about World War II, the Korean
War, the Vietnam War, and possibly the Gulf War as well. Through films and historical readings, we will attempt to define the
epistemology of American Orientalism. How is Orientalism different from racism against Asians? What is the relationship between American
Orientalism and other racial ideologist? Is Orientalism opposed to Americanness, or to whiteness? Some of the historical events we will
examine are the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the invasion of the Philippines, the forced evacuation and internment of Japanese
Americans from the American West Coast, the conscription of Japanese Americans into the American military, the dropping of the atomic bomb
at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Occupation of Japan, China as ally in World War II and enemy in the Cold War, and the political immigration of Vietnamese "boat people."Preference for AMST 401 will be given to fourth-year AMST majors and APAS minors, although others are welcome to enroll if
space is available. This course is cross-listed as ENAM 481G (9 additional spaces).
AMST 493 Independent Study
TBA