AMST 310
Race Wars in America Spring 2013
Division II Exploring Diversity Initiative
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

This course examines the ways in which race/racism and war/militarism have operated as mutually constitutive processes throughout the twentieth century. At the same time that America’s wars abroad–from the Philippines and Cuba in 1898 to Iraq and Afghanistan–have highlighted “new” and “old” forms of racism, they have also been central to shaping “common-sense” racial ideologies and projects. This class can be considered a broad cultural history of race and race-making, but our framework means to foreground the inherence of violence of the story and history of race, both recognizable and hidden. We will be particularly attentive to the uneven distribution and experiences of war and violence and the ways in which they are racialized and gendered. Given our topic and framework, then, keep in mind that there will be a fair amount of representations of physical and other kinds of violence in the course materials. Course materials will range from and include literary (selected works by Chester Himes among others) but also scholarly/theoretical (Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, etc.) and cultural/visual (including films, to be determined) texts. This course reflects the aims of Exploring Diversity Initiative by critically considering the rhetoric of “diversity” that often forgets the very real existence of violence in encounters with difference and otherness.
The Class: Format: lecture
Limit: 25
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: active in-class and on-line participation; 2-3 short response papers, in-class presentation and/or workshop; final paper
Prerequisites: none
Distributions: Division II Exploring Diversity Initiative
Attributes: AMST Comp Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Diaspora

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