American Studies Fall 2008 Course Descriptions

AMST 55H:  Birth and Death in the United States

Section 1:  Tim Marr

1:00 MWF, 213 Graham Memorial

This course explores birth and death as essential human rites of passage defined by changing American historical and cultural contexts.  Birth and death define life in ways that none of us can recall or relate with experiential authority, so examining them provides powerful insights into how culture mediates the construction of bodies and social identities.  Birth and death, in contrast to much of America’s history when they took part in the home, often happen in contemporary United States behind institutional conventions of professional practice and medical confidentiality.  This seminar uses active interdisciplinary learning to expose the ways that various Americans have historically defined the meanings of these passages through different processes of cultural power.  Readings and assignments are designed to provoke dynamic understandings of birth and death by examining the changing anthropological rituals, medical procedures, scientific technologies, religious meanings, and ethical quandaries surrounding them.  We will explore a variety of representations of birth and death in literary expressions, film, material culture, and institutional practice.

 AMST 58:  Cultures of Dissent:  The American Indian Experience

Section 1:  Tol Foster

9:00 MWF, 204 Murphey

Last year the United Nations voted to create a Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.  Only four countries – the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia – voted against the proposal.  These four countries, despite their democratic legal systems, are all settler-populated colonial governments which have imposed their government over that of the original indigenous inhabitants of the land.  For the United States, a “land of immigrants,” American Indians represent perhaps the greatest “problem” for the articulation of the United States as a place of equality and freedom, for unlike other constituents of the country, the validity of the nation’s claims depend on the abrogation of those of their own sovereign nations.

 

This course focuses in a concentrated way on the experience of American Indians as colonized people under a democracy, with the understanding that they, both as individuals and as sovereign tribal governments, represent a unique challenge for a contractual democracy.  At times, victories for American Indians in United States courts have meant greater freedom for other Americans, as with religious freedom; at other times, their legal status as “domestic dependant nations” has meant that they are beholden to a capricious federal government determined to exploit their resources and deny them redress.

 

Through a number of texts, drawing heavily from legal documents, histories, documentaries, and critical scholarship, this course will focus on three major areas that dramatize the distinct status of American Indians in the United States:  the land, tribal sovereignty, and American Indian personhood.  In considering the land, we will study how it is that the United States was able to appropriate American Indian tribal homelands, throughout American history, such that the Bureau of Indian Affairs still administers roughly 56 million acres of tribal land and the rest has passed largely from indigenous to non-indigenous owners.  In considering tribal sovereignty we will be tracing the ways in which tribes are, and are not, like other governments, such that they can build casinos (some of them, anyway) but they cannot build nuclear weapons, for example.  We will also consider, as a part of this discussion, the federal and state recognition of tribal nations such as the Lumbee and Eastern Band of the Cherokee in North Carolina, and the processes and problems of such distinctions.  Finally, we will consider the gradual emancipation of American Indian individuals from their status as enemies, wards of the state and objects of scientific study, de-tribalized and racially quantified citizens, and finally as dual citizens of the United States.

 

In addition to a series of short papers and projects assigned based on the readings of the course, the instructor will direct a discipline-specific final research project tailored to the interests of each student in the course.

 

AMST 110:  Native North America

Section 6:  Theda Perdue

12:00 MWF;  211 Chapman

This interdisciplinary course draws from history, archaeology, cultural anthropology, law and public policy, art, music, film, and literature to introduce students to the major themes that have shaped the lives of North American Indians.  The course also will deal with U.S. Indian policy, the relations between Indians and non-Indians, and the relations between various Indian peoples.

 

AMST 201:  Approaches to American Studies

Section 1:  Robert Cantwell

12:30 TR, 204 Murphey

Through literature, film, music, and the pictorial arts this course will seize upon specific moments central to the American experience from the Revolutionary to the modern periods, in order to examine their special issues, themes, and problems.  Of particular interest will be the shifting strata of social class in America, its ethnic and racial divisions, and its vivid popular culture.  In all instances our principal work will be close interpretative reading, watching, and looking, open-minded discussion, and a continuing inquiry into the nature of American civilization.

 

AMST 233:  Western Native Americans

Section 1:  Michael Green

2:00 TR, 103 Bingham

This course explores the histories of American Indians who lived west of the Mississippi from the archaeological past to the end of the 19^th century.  Using an ethnohistorical methodology, the course will discuss and explain relations between Native groups, the European invasion and the responses of Indians, the development of the Plains Indian culture, and the expansion into the West by the United States.  The course will end with the development of the allotment policy.

 

AMST 253:  Mamas and Matriarchs:  A Social History of Jewish Women in America

Section 1:  Marcie Ferris

2:00 MWF;  204 Murphey

This course will examine the history and culture of Jewish women in America from their arrival in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the present day.  We will explore how gender shaped Jewish women’s experiences of immigration, assimilation, religious observance, home, work, motherhood, family, and feminism.  The course will also investigate how factors such as regions, race, class, country of origin, and religious denomination influenced the lives of Jewish women in America, and in turn, how Jewish women have shaped the national expression of American Judaism.  Texts and discussions consider how these factors have created an American Jewish women’s history that is distinctive from men’s.  Students will examine a variety of sources, including diaries, memoirs, letters, film, recipes, organizational records, and artifacts that reveal women’s voices that are absent in more traditional histories.  The central goal of the course is to integrate Jewish women into the American past, and thus, fundamentally transform American Jewish history.

 

AMST 256:  Anti-‘50s:  Voices of a Counter Decade

Section 1:  Robert Cantwell

9:30 TR, 204 Murphey

We remember the nineteen-fifties as a period of relative tranquility, happiness, optimism and contentment.  The decade saw unprecedented prosperity, an expanding middle class, the consolidation of a postwar national security state and the ascendancy of America as a global power.  The picture is not altogether mistaken.  Yet the ‘fifties had its sores and blemishes:  a too passionate social conformity, a crass and overblown consumerism, a fatuous ideology of the family, as well as the usual forms of racism, anti-semitism, homophobia and class resentment which in such eruptions and McCarthyism enjoyed episodes of national assent.

 

This course will consider a handful of counter-texts:  voices from literature, film, politics, and mass culture of the nineteen-fifties that each for one or another reason found life in the postwar world repressive, empty, frightening, or insane, and predicted the social and cultural revolutions that marked the decade that followed.

 

AMST 259:  Tobacco and America

Section 1:  Tim Marr

10:00 MWF; 217 Peabody

This interdisciplinary APPLES course examines a plant of great local importance to focus on changing histories of land use, social rituals, gendered leisure, commercial marketing, public health, and global capitalism.  We will explore different cultures of tobacco in America ranging from traditional Native American ceremony, to the economy of the South, up to recent battles in the courts over public exposure and regulation.  The course will consider diverse perspectives from agriculture, epidemiology, literature, popular music and film, folklore, labor and legal history, advertising and material culture.  Please note that the central learning in this course will emerge from an engaged long-term service project with a community institution addressing key tobacco-related issues in North Carolina today.

 

AMST 285:  Access to Work

Section 1:  Rachel Willis

12:30 TR; 308 Gardner

For description contact Professor Willis at Rachel.Willis@unc.edu.

 

AMST 290:  Introduction to the American Indian Literatures

Section 1:  Tol Foster

11 MWF; 220 Peabody

This survey course will set out the context of Native American cultural and historical life through the exploration of literature in a variety of genres.  Native critical terms and concepts, as well as major historical moments in Native history, will be elucidated through oral literature, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, film, and novels, primarily drawn from the twentieth century, and from tribal groups of the continental  United States.  Although minor texts and authors will be included, major writers and texts will include Charles Eastman (Indian Boyhood)  Leslie Marmon Silko (Storyteller), Pretty Shield (Pretty Shield), LeAnne Howe (Shellshaker), Thomas King (Green Grass, Running Water), and Sherman Alexie’s film The Business of Fancy Dancing.

 

AMST 334H:  Defining America, Part I

Section 152:  John Kasson

2:00 TR;  213 Graham Memorial

INTENDED FOR RISING JUNIORS AND RISING SOPHOMORES

This honors course is interdisciplinary in its inquiry and methods.  It combines history, literature, and the visual arts in studying eight topics, ranging chronologically from the early eighteenth century through the civil war.  Our first topic, the story of the Williams family of Deerfield, MA, will rely on a secondary account by the historian John Demos.  We will aim to emulate some of his methods in studying the primary materials in the following units:  the rise of Benjamin Franklin; Thomas Jefferson and the construction of republican identity; the Cherokee Removal; African-American slave narratives; woman’s rights and woman’s “sphere”; Walt Whitman and the creation of a democratic  self; Abraham Lincoln and the meaning of Union.

 

Readings will include:  John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive; Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography; selections from The Portable Thomas Jefferson; materials on the Cherokee removal; writing by Margaret Fuller, Catharine Beecher, Angelina Grimke , Elizabeth Cady Stanton; a choice of antebellum slave narratives; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855 edition); and selections from The Portable Abraham Lincoln.  The aim of the course is to learn about the rich experience and imaginative life of earlier America and how to think about it in fresh, eye-opening ways.  Students will write short essays on each of the principal units of the course.

 

AMST 390:  Home Sweet Home:  The American House in Critical Perspective

Section 1:  Katherine Roberts

2:00 – 4:50 W; Murphey 304

This course is designed to attune students to the complexities of human shelter.  We will begin our journey by studying the development of several national and regional housing types in the U.S. and the environmental and socio-political factors that contributed to their formation.  From shotguns to ranches to public housing developments and more, we will learn about how domestic forms in the built environment have contributed to American cultural landscapes – past and present.  In addition, we will explore the social use and meaning of housing and examine the strategies people use to create “homes” out of built forms.  Finally, we consider two case studies that reveal how factors such as race, class and gender affect dwelling patterns in the U.S.  By the end of the course, students should be able to understand the built environment as a form of communication, capable of revealing what we value as individuals and communities and as a nation, and to critically evaluate the ways in which housing mediates power relations in the U.S. 

 

The course will consist of lectures and discussion led by the instructor and by students, several field trips, and a fieldwork project.  The fieldwork project will focus on any aspect of housing in America and must involve engagement with built forms and human beings.  Course materials will include readings drawn from articles, required texts (TBA), in-class films and data generated during student field projects.

 

AMST  398:  Service Learning

Section 1:  Rachel Willis

2:00 – 4:50 W; 010 Peabody

For a description of this course email Professor Rachel Willis.

 

AMST  483:  Seeing  America:  Visual Culture and American Studies

Section 1:  Joy Kasson

2:00 TR; 204 Murphey

This course will explore visual culture throughout American history; that is, it will examine the ways in which visual objects – paintings, photographs, sculpture, architecture, film, advertising images, and other images – communicate the values of American culture and raise questions about American experiences.  Topics will include colonial portraits, nineteenth-century sculptures  of  women, the works of major artists including Charles Willson Peale, Winslow  Homer, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Grant Wood; photography; popular culture, including magazines such as National Geographic; museums; historical sites such as Williamsburg; and film.  Students will write short papers and prepare a class presentation.

 

AMST 486:  “Shalom Y’all”:  The Jewish Experience in the American South

Section 1:  Marcie Cohen Ferris

11:00 MWF;  204 Murphey

This course explores ethnicity in the South and focuses on the experience of Jewish southerners.  Since the arrival of Sephardic Jews in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, southern Jews have blended their regional identity as Jews and as Southerners.  This course explores the “braided identity” of Jews in the South—their relationships with white and black Gentile southerners, their loyalty to the South as a region, and their embrace of southern culture through foodways and religious observance.  The course traces the history of Jewish southerners from the colonial era to the present, using film, museum exhibits, literature, and material culture as resources.  Throughout the course we consider the question of southern Jewish distinctiveness.  Is southern Jewish culture distinctive from Jewish culture in other regions of the country, and if so, why?  Is region a significant factor in American Jewish identity?  Students will explore these issues through class discussion and a research paper.

 

AMST 499:  The Life, Death, and Rebirth of Native Food

Section 1:  Rayna Green, Lehman-Brady Visiting Professor of Documentary Studies at UNC and Duke

3:30 – 5:50 W, 204 Murphey

This course brings together people interested in Native American and American Studies, Food Studies, Environmental  Studies, Anthropology, History, Folklife, Cultural Geography, and , well, food.  The description below is a topical listing for some of the things that will occupy us during the semester.

Mother Corn meets the Dixie pig and Marco Polo’s Chinese noodles meet marinara sauce at the global grocery:  the influence of Native food on American, regional, and global foodways;  Native and American:  how Native food shaped regional, ethnic, and national identities; the expropriation and reject of Native, Native food, and Native identity;  Land, people, and Native food:  the politics, economics, cultures, and geographies of food, in the South, the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes, Alaska, Oklahoma, California; Cane Sieves and Iron Pots:  the material culture of Native food, tradition and change; Natural history and human history:  plants, animals, and people, fishing, hunting, subsistence living, growing; species and human diversity; environment disaster and revitalization;  Food fights:  land, water, and war, salmon, (save the) whales, buffalo, Bambi, corn, wheat, and wild rice; The last Thanksgiving: blood and sugar/diabetes, corn and pellagra, dietary changes and nutritional disasters; the locavoracious eat grits and recover;  Nacho Nation:  the other Native food(s) in and of El Norte.

There will be lectures, class discussions, field and library research, local documentation (yes, we will find our subject on the campus yard, groceries, restaurants, farmer’s markets, and local byways), and perhaps, even some gathering, cooking, and consumption of our subject.

AMST 800:  Interpretation of American Culture

Section 1:  Philip Gura

6:00 – 8:30 W; Gaskin Library

GRADUATE STUDENTS ONLY

This course is designed to acquaint graduate students with a range of methodological possibilities within the interdisciplinary field of American Studies, particularly as they might contribute to revisionary work in American literary and cultural history.  In no sense an inclusive and/or strictly chronological survey of all the texts that have been influential since the founding of the American Studies movement fifty years ago, instead the course will allow for discussion of the confluence of literary studies with those in other disciplines.  The material ranges from the era of European settlement to the early twentieth century, with most texts treating the nineteenth century.  We will read a book a week, hear contemporary assessments of each book’s importance, discuss in depth each author’s choice and use of sources, and suggest the continuing value of his or her scholarship and methodology for our own scholarly projects.

 

Regular attendance is expected.  Active classroom participation, evidenced foremost by your willingness to sympathize with the scholarly project with which a particular author is engaged, even if the specific field is not of compelling interest to you.  Each week some students will be assigned reports on contemporary reviews of the work under discussion.  Others will be asked to review key sources used by an author, to evaluate the nature of his or her engagement with primary materials essential to the scholarship.  In addition, each week each student will write a three-to-four page response to the text in question; some of these may be read in class.  And a final 20-25 page paper in which you explore how the methodology or sources one or more of these scholars uses applies to your own research interests.

 

AMST 878/HIST 878:  Readings in Native American History

Section 1:  Michael Green

6:00-8:50 R; 204 Murphey

GRADUATE STUDENTS ONLY

This readings seminar is open only to graduate students.  We will meet weekly to discuss key issues in American Indian history and the scholarly literature that relates to them.