Teaching Stories: Featured Fall 2016 Course Offerings, Part I
Being an interdisciplinary department, American Studies has a history of offering fascinating courses about American culture, politics, and history that you cannot find anywhere else on campus. Today, we feature four of those courses taught by our stellar Ph.D. students, to be offered in Fall 2016 and Spring 2017, about fascinating and timely topics like conservative politics in America, public education, energy and oil, and the image of the American Indian. We'll feature more of our courses over the next few weeks, so stay tuned!Each of these courses is a lower division course and will fulfill your writing flag requirements.
AMS 311s: The Culture of the Right
Unique # 30555Instructor: Carrie AndersenMWF 11am - 12pmThe moniker “conservative” can apply at once to fiction authors like Ayn Rand, political theorists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Renaissance men like Henry David Thoreau, television writers like the creators of South Park, and preachers like Jerry Falwell. How? What does it mean to be conservative? How has that definition transformed over time? And how are those ideologies expressed, reimagined, and critiqued in not only political texts and speeches, but also a variety of different cultural forms, from film to television shows to music to videogames?In this class, we will explore those cultural forms to understand the changing politics of the Right in America from the 19th century through the 2016 election cycle, emphasizing in particular the relationship between the history of the Right and current events in culture and politics. In tracking the historical development of the Right, we will also attend to the interplay between conservative ideology and race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion.This course will draw upon a variety of primary source texts (including films, television shows, fictional stories, essays, videogames, and music) as well as secondary source analyses of those cultural works.Finally, a key question will subtly guide many of our discussions, readings, and assignments: how did we get from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump?
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AMS 311s: Cultures of American Energy
Unique # 30560Instructor: Emily RoehlMWF 12pm - 1pmSources of energy are all around us—deep underground, blowing in the wind, stored in muscle and bone, mined and refined. The way we work, move, eat, and play is deeply connected to the histories and cultures of these energy sources. For this reason, energy is an important topic not only to engineers and economists but to humanities scholars as well. In this course, we will consider the histories and cultures of energy in North America from the mid-19th century to the present. We will dig into the question of energy by focusing on four themes: energy frontiers past and present, energy disasters fast and slow; energy in cultural memory; and energy media. We will look at representations of various energy sources (fossil fuels, human and animal power, wood, water, and wind) in film, television, literature, art, photography, museums displays, and industry archives while considering the role of energy in our everyday lives.
AMS 311s: Imagining Public Education
Unique # 30565Instructor: Caroline PinkstonMWF 1pm - 2pmThe last sixty years have been a remarkable and tumultuous period for American public education. From the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools to the more recent controversies over charter schools and high-stakes testing, public education has spent much of the last half-century right in the middle of national debates about equality, justice, and democracy. A recurring narrative in these debates is that our public schools are failing, and that fixing them is crucial to solving other longstanding issues of poverty and racial injustice.Where does this narrative come from? What stories and images contribute to the way we understand the importance of public schooling and its apparent failures? What’s at stake when we imagine a “failing” public school – or, for that matter, a successful one?This course will examine contesting representations of public school in American culture from the 1960’s to the present day. This will not be a course in the history of American education. Our main purpose, instead, will be to investigate cultural perceptions of the state of public education, in pop culture, in the news, and beyond. What’s the relationship between the stories we tell about public education, the policy that determines what happens in schools, and broader cultural anxieties about race, childhood, and social justice? We will consider sources including film and television, policy briefs & journalism, nonfiction texts & memoir, children’s literature & school curriculum.Potential texts (excerpts): Up the Down Staircase (Kaufman, 1964); Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools (Kozol, 1990); Bad Boys: Public Schools and the Making of Black Masculinity (Ferguson, 2000); Whatever it Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest to Change Harlem and America (Tough; 2009)Potential films (excerpts): The Breakfast Club (1985), Dangerous Minds (1995); Freedom Writers (2007); Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save America’s Failing Schools (2010)
AMS 311s: The Mythic Indian in American Culture
Unique # 30570Instructor: Eddie WhitewolfMWF 9am - 10amAmerican culture is replete with images of the “Indian.” From the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to professional sports team mascots, and from the packaging on Land ‘o’ Lakes butter to Walt Disney animated feature films, the “Indian” remains a pervasive yet enigmatic figure, but also, in the words of Vine Deloria, “unreal and ahistorical.” This course will interrogate the image of the mythic Indian in American popular culture, as seen through a variety of media, including American history, world’s fairs and expositions, public museum exhibits, literature, and film.
5 Questions with AMS Afficilate Faculty Member Dr. Jim Cox
Today we are pleased to bring back a favorite feature here at AMS::ATX----5 Questions! Today's interview introduces you to Dr. James H. Cox, AMS affiliate faculty member in English and author of the forthcoming book, The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico.
What has been your favorite project to work on and why?My most recent project was on American Indian writers who traveled to Mexico and wrote about it and its indigenous population. This was an exciting project because I was thinking about comparative indigeneities, about the way indigeneity is experienced in the United States and Mexico, and how it’s experienced when people are crossing the border as well. I enjoyed it because I was writing about a time period in American Indian writing that has been largely neglected by literature scholars, and overlooked by historians, too. This period falls between the progressive and civil rights eras – it looks like an empty four decades, but the period is actually full of manuscripts and published works that only a few people have studied in depth. The genre diversity within the project is fun as well – I worked with detective novels, worked with plays, which I had never done before, and nonfiction. I was going outside of the more conventional literary genres, reading biographies and memoirs and histories by Native authors.Additionally, I’ve just started a new project that I’m really stoked about. One of the writers in the American Indians in Mexico project is Lynn Riggs, a Cherokee dramatist who published between 15-20 plays, a book of cowboy songs, and a book of poetry during his life. He wrote about 10 other plays that went unproduced and unpublished. In 1931, he also made an experimental film with a director named James Hughes and with guidance from several fairly well known cinematographers from Hollywood, including Henwar Rodakiewicz. It is a 15 minute film of a day in Santa Fe. When the film was complete, he showed it first to the literary crowd--Alice Corbin Henderson, Spud Johnson--in Santa Fe at that time. It’s a silent movie, and he interspersed it with a poem of his called “Santo Domingo Corn Dance.” There are two dominant images in the film. One is of a huge cross outside a church in Santa Fe, and then there’s a dance by local indigenous people. So I’m going to Santa Fe and the New Mexico historical archives. In particular, I want to know who the dancers are. If the dance in the film is actually the corn dance, then Riggs violated a prohibition against filming it. I suspect it wasn’t, but, if so, I’d like to know how and why Riggs staged it the way he did for the film. I’m also interested in his multicultural conception of Santa Fe at the time: there are Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Anglos, interspersed throughout the entire film; and I’m interested in the images too of the cross and the corn dance and how he’s playing with both of them to convey a sense of the religious identity of this place.How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations in the academy or contemporary society?Obviously I find it very easy to talk to people in American Studies and history, and people with interdisciplinary backgrounds in Native American and indigenous studies. My work is also political in the way I’m interested in foregrounding native voices and native material culture. In that regard, it connects directly to public issues such as the debate over Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry. The Chief of the Cherokee Nation just protested Scott Brown’s staff mocking Warren by doing the tomahawk chop and war whoops and that sort of thing. So when I see something like that, it’s directly related to my work and I’ll talk about that in class. It comes down to issues of representation, but representation as it is deeply entangled in public policy and as it shapes the lives of Native people.What projects, people, and /or things have inspired your work?The fiction writers that I read are the first inspiration. When I was a graduate student and I read Sherman Alexie and Thomas King for the first time; I thought it was the most compelling and provocative literature I had ever read. It had a sense of urgency that I liked, a sense of urgency that showed how much storytelling and literature matter in our lives. King’s novel Green Grass Running Water is just a brilliant piece of writing – an extraordinary work, a classic of literature in English. In terms of scholarship – you know, I think that I’m inspired by people who do what I want to do better than I could ever do it – particularly literature scholars who work really well with history and culture more broadly speaking. Recent books that come to mind like this are Phillip Round’s Removable Type, which is a study of early American Indian print culture, or Lisa Brooks’ The Common Pot, which is a study of early American Indian writing in the northeast – both of those are two scholars who, because I’m a literature scholar and the text matters to me a little more than everything else, I admire the way that they combine their analyses of texts with discussions of really broad and deep contexts.Also when I was a graduate student, New Historicism was a new and influential critical practice. It approached texts as objects that circulate throughout a culture in all kinds of fascinating and wonderful ways, a culture that also informs their production and consumption – that was really influential. I remember the most significant critical collection for me as a graduate student was Aram Veeser’s The New Historicism. I never approached books as a critic as if they were isolated from the real world -- from economics and race and sexuality and so on -- so the approach agreed with me.What is your background as a scholar and how does this background inform and motivate your current teaching and research?I always knew this is what I wanted to do. I always thought of myself as someone who studied literature – maybe not a lit scholar but someone who studied literature. My training is primarily in American and British literature and both American and European history – that’s the basis. Even as a graduate student, I didn’t limit myself to one period or one genre or one century. I spent much of my time in the Renaissance, and I took classes in Greek mythology and the history of Western literary criticism and so on. I had classic liberal arts training. So as a Master’s student I was very much a generalist, and I applied to grad school as a Renaissance scholar. It didn’t take me long to decide that wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do.I hope that I’m one of the last people who wanted to study native literature but had to do it without ever taking a class in it. I had one independent study with a professor at Nebraska, but otherwise, there was a lot of self-training and working with my peers in the graduate program who wanted to do the same thing. We sought people out and asked them what to read, and we went to conferences, and every time a scholar was quoted we wrote her name down, and then we went home and read her book. We did that for years. Eventually that’s what I decided to do. And even after I graduated the training continued – I was probably 6 or 7 years out when I thought I finally could call myself a Native Americanist. I had refrained from doing so because I just didn’t think that I knew enough. But by that point I had enough guidance from mentors, I’d read enough books, went to conferences that focused on Native literature, and I thought, okay, I can speak comfortably in this field now.What projects would you like to work on in the future?Well, I’m thinking about a project on American Indian-published periodicals since they reached a broader audience than most of the literary works that I study. They have a kind of political and historical immediacy that I’m interested in – I’m talking about weeklies and monthlies. This summer I spent a week at the Native Press Archives at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock and read the National Indian Youth Council’s Americans Before Columbus, for one example. I’ve read some of Rupert Costo’s San Francisco-based Indian Historical Society journal the Indian Historian as well. And Akwesasne Notes, which in its original form was produced by somebody on the Mohawk reservation sitting in his house stapling articles about political events into a new publication – he would staple them all together and then send them out to subscribers. Eventually they hired their own writers and were able to put together their own publication with original writing, but to me it’s an almost heroic endeavor for somebody who felt so strongly about people knowing what was happening at the time.But I’d also like to take my training in Native American and indigenous studies and look at celebrated non-Native authors such as Philip Roth and Tennessee Williams and Ernest Hemingway. Roth, for example, is thinking about the status of immigrant Jewish families in The Plot Against America at a time during which federal Indian policy was about to swing back towards assimilation after a brief period of reform. In that novel he imagines an alternative history of removal and relocation for Jewish families immediately prior to an actual period of relocation for Native people. Tennessee Williams incorporates native characters into some of his plays in very strange ways, and I hope to work with a colleague on an article about that.As far as teaching goes, I just started a Hemingway course, which I taught for the first time this summer. I grew up reading Hemingway, so it has been fun to return to him. I would very much like to do a graduate course in native American and Mexican American indigeneity to expand the scope of what I teach and build from what I’m already doing in my research.If you could describe American Studies in one sentence, what would you say?American Studies is the Antiques Roadshow of the liberal arts.