The Occupation of Alcatraz, 1969. Photograph by Vince Maggiora.
US Multiethnic Literature: “Movement Literature”
Spring 2016, Spring 2020
“Why are they showing this to us?” Ta-Nehisi Coates asked every February when his teachers wheeled in a TV from the AV department and, in honor of Black History Month, showed him and his classmates footage of white policemen beating black people protesting the segregation of Southern schools, public transportation, and lunch counters. There had to be more to the civil rights movement, Coates suspected, than “films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.”
Bayard Rustin, the black labor leader, thought the same thing in 1965, when he declared the end of the “classical stage” of the civil rights movement––stretching from the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 to the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the movement Coates learned about in school––and looked ahead to the movement’s next stage. “At issue, after all, is not civil rights strictly speaking, but social and economic conditions,” he wrote. “The civil rights movement is evolving from a protest movement into a full-fledged social movement.”
This course is about the literature of that larger social movement, from the black popular front of the 1930s and 1940s, in which Rustin himself participated, to the women of color feminisms of the 1970s and 1980s. Through the writing of Carlos Bulosan, Anne Moody, Huey Newton, Rodolfo Gonzales, Frank Chin, and Audre Lorde, we explore the long, multiple, transnational social movements that so often demanded more than civil rights. The civil rights movement is, as Coates discovered in high school, a story handed down to us that may foreground some people and struggles and set aside others. This course interrogates the movement stories we tell and reconsiders the stories we don’t.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Major American Writers: “The Other Fifties”
Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2020
In his 1984 autobiography, Amiri Baraka, the poet and spokesman of the black arts movement, looked back on the mid-1950s as a moment of change. Dwight Eisenhower, born in 1890, had won a second term as president. John F. Kennedy, thirty years younger and soon to succeed him, had just arrived in the Senate. A young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, new on the national stage, had led a successful movement to desegregate public transportation in Montgomery, Alabama. “This was, I think, a time of transition,” Baraka wrote. “From the cooled-out reactionary 50’s, the 50’s of the Cold War and McCarthyism and HUAC, to the late 50’s of the surging civil rights movement.”
This course is about that time of transition. The 1950s, though often remembered as a decade of conformity, also introduced the nation to a cast of rebels and outsiders: Holden Caulfield, James Dean, Alice Childress, the Beats, Nina Simone, and the characters of Mad magazine. The literature we read tells their stories and looks ahead to the tumultuous decade to come. We witness a “slight rebellion” in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), encounter a different kind of sermon in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), catch a con man in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), and achieve transcendence, or not, in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958). This course asks which decade we’re talking about when we say “the fifties” and how that decade imagined and created the future.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Ann Petry, 1948. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale University.
Race and Gender in American Literature (graduate): “The Strange Career of Racial Liberalism”
Fall 2019
In August 2010, before addressing the nation from the Oval Office to declare an end to the Iraq War, President Barack Obama redecorated. His team installed a new oval rug emblazoned with the words of Martin Luther King, himself paraphrasing the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Obama recited the words in speeches throughout his time in office, beginning with his first speech as president-elect in 2008. Since King first used the phrase in 1958, it has stood as a motto of racial liberalism, promising the gradual realization of an antiracist America somewhere in the future. (This departed from King’s original messianic meaning; he didn’t expect to find justice on Earth.) When Donald Trump moved into the Oval Office in 2017, he threw out the rug.
With racial liberalism facing a second, and perhaps terminal, crisis under Trump, this seminar returns to the postwar period to reconsider the culture of Cold War racial liberalism, from World War II to the end of the Vietnam War. This first iteration of reformist antiracism originated from the black press, where soldiers serving in a segregated army campaigned for a “double victory” over fascism abroad and fascism at a home, and, in a different vein, from the Carnegie Corporation, which commissioned Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal to write the 1944 tome An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. “What America is constantly reaching for is democracy at home and abroad,” Myrdal declared. “The main trend in its history is the realization of the American Creed.” This seminar investigates how writers contributed to and traced the limits of the racial paradigm that delivered some civil rights victories and made others impossible. We ask what the narrative arc of the postwar “race novel” might reveal about the moral arc of Myrdal’s American creed.
Through the writing of Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, Lillian Smith, and José Antonio Villarreal, this seminar examines the emergence of the liberal faith in racial progress as well as alternative stories of race in America and alternative horizons for antiracist struggles. We situate our readings and conversations in relation to the long civil rights era and the Cold War to consider how racial liberalism and race radicalism grew out of and responded to the rise of Soviet communism and the decolonization of Asia and Africa. In 1955, historian C. Vann Woodward published The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which King hailed as “the historical bible of the civil rights movement.” This seminar turns to the strange career of the racial regime that came next.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Frank Sinatra in The Manchurian Candidate, 1962.
American Fiction, 1960 to the Present: “Cold War Culture”
Fall 2015, Fall 2019
In 1955, publishing executive William Spaulding invited Dr. Seuss to dinner. Spaulding had heard reports that American children were falling behind Soviet children in reading comprehension because they found their primers boring and would rather spend their time watching television and reading comic books. Spaulding gave Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) a list of three hundred words and asked him to write a book that a first grader could read on her own. Dr. Seuss returned a manuscript titled The Cat in the Hat. Spaulding worried that six-year-olds weren’t pulling their weight in the Cold War, and he built a commercial market for children’s literature as a weapon against the Soviet Union.
This course investigates some of the surprising connections between the Cold War and American culture. The Cold War, in which the capitalist West vied with the communist Soviet bloc for dominance in nuclear weapons and space exploration and influence in decolonizing Asia and Africa, left few things untouched in postwar America, including an illustrated cat in a hat. Some of the connections we explore are obvious: McCarthyism in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), American imperial desire in Graham Green’s The Quiet American (1955). Others are more implicit: the containment of the black left in Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family (1956), the long shadow of the Korean War in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995).
This course asks how Cold War politics governed the culture Americans made and consumed in the years after World War II and how culture motivated, reflected, and challenged prevailing ideas about capitalism, communism, and American power. How did the government use literature and art to advance Cold War interests? How did writers and artists respond to the second red scare? What can Cold War culture teach us about literature and art in the twenty-first century? How is the Cold War still with us? This course uses novels, films, and visual art to consider how the Cold War built the incongruous cultural world––free and constrained, creative and uniform––in which we live.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Seminar in Critical Race Theory
Spring 2018, Spring 2019
“Race is,” Stuart Hall wrote in 1980, “the modality in which class is lived.” It is, Michael Omi and Howard Winant argued in 1986, “an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle.”
“Racism,” Audre Lorde explained in 1984, is “the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance.” It is, Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote two decades later, “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”
What is race? What is racism? This course is about how cultural theorists, sociologists, poets, activists, geographers, and political philosophers have confronted terms that we all think we know––that we all live with and through––but struggle to define. Critical race theory arose, at least in name, in the 1970s as scholars and activists came to recognize the limitations and legal vulnerabilities of the gains of the civil rights era. The theoretical framework they built asks that we interrogate an idea that we hold dear in the United States: racial progress, the belief that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice. Some of our readings are difficult, some frustrating, and we consider where theory serves us and where it may confuse and obstruct conversation and action. This course is about theory, but it is also about the uneven distribution of life chances and why we live our lives together and apart.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Walker Evans, Torn Movie Poster, 1931.
Introduction to American Studies
Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Spring 2019
In 1842, Charles Dickens landed in Boston Harbor. Twenty-nine years old and the most famous living writer in the English-speaking world, Dickens bound through the Boston streets, thrilled to be in the United States for the first time. “Here we are!” he greeted a throng of well-wishers at the Tremont Hotel. But his warm feelings toward his hosts didn’t last long. He found American slavery abhorrent, American manners crude, and American politics malicious. “This is not the Republic I came to see,” he wrote a friend in Britain. “This is not the Republic of my imagination.”
This course is about the nation that Dickens imagined, the nation that disappointed him, and how Americans, then and now, live with the distance between the America they imagine and the America they know. It is an introduction to American studies, a field that brings together thinkers from all different backgrounds––historians, ethnic studies scholars, activists, political scientists, sociologists, regular Joes, and disillusioned British novelists––to investigate the social and cultural life of the United States. Through fiction, film, political speeches, popular music, and comics, we consider how a diverse cast of Americans have defined and claimed, and redefined and reclaimed, the nation as their own. From the inscrutable diaries of George Washington to the ugly precedent of the Chinese Exclusion Act to Henry Luce’s declaration of an “American century,” this course invites us to, like Dickens, take in the United States anew, bad manners and all.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Flannery O’Connor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1947. Flannery O’Connor Collection, Georgia College.
Studies in Twentieth-Century American Literature: “Institutions of American Literature”
Fall 2018
In 1946, Flannery O’Connor, twenty-one years old, entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the first creative writing program in the United States. “What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on,” she mused at the time. Graduate school was at least better, she concluded, than “the poor house” or “the mad house.” In 1967, Raymond Carver, then working for a textbook publisher in Palo Alto, met his future editor Gordon Lish, who would cut his manuscripts down to the bone, revealing the “minimalism” for which Carver later became known. In 1987, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, though hailed as an instant classic, did not win the National Book Award, setting off a fight over race and the institutions that confer cultural distinction (the #OscarsSoWhite of the 1980s). In 1998, Dave Eggers founded McSweeney’s, launching a new era of “indie” publishing, as well as his own career.
No writer is an island. Authors write their own books, of course, but they write them in and through institutions: the creative writing program, the editor and publishing house, the book award, the independent press. This course is about the creative, collaborative, and sometimes bureaucratic art of making capital-L literature in the United States. How did the Iowa Writers’ Workshop change O’Connor’s writing? What influence did Carver’s editor have on his? How did not winning the National Book Award (and later winning the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel) alter the course of Morrison’s career? How did independent publishing facilitate Eggers’s? This course asks how literature gets made and read, including in an English department class like this one.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Seminar in American Literature since 1900 (graduate): “American Cultural Memory”
Spring 2018
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920.
“Historical memory today is not what it used to be,” critical theorist Andreas Huyssen wrote in 2003. The West confronts “a fundamental disturbance not just of the relationship between history as objective and scientific, and memory as subjective and personal, but of history itself and its promises.” This seminar is about cultural memory, the location of that “disturbance,” where history and memory collide.
When a mourner leaves an old letter from a loved one at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, her personal memory enters the domain of cultural memory––others can see it and read it. When the National Park Service collects and archives the letter, it transforms from cultural memory to history––the government vests it with national meaning and makes it available to future generations of Americans as historical content.
Personal memory, cultural memory, history. This seminar is about the fluid boundaries between them, the cultural struggle to sustain, revise, enter, and dismantle history as we know it in the United States. From the early theories of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Halbwachs to the writing of Avery Gordon, Lisa Lowe, and Viet Nguyen, we investigate how the nation comes to affirm some versions of the past and why it remain oblivious to others, what Lowe calls “the politics of our lack of knowledge.” (We consider, for example, what kind of memory the Vietnam Veterans Memorial encourages and what kind of memory it inhibits.) If historical memory is not what it used to be, then this seminar asks what it is now.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Asian American Literature: “Asian American Literature and the Cold War”
Fall 2017
In 1968, Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka, students at the University of California, Berkeley, founded the Asian American Political Alliance to mobilize students of Asian descent against the Vietnam War. The AAPA was the first national organization to unite Americans of diverse Asian backgrounds under a now-familiar banner: Asian American. “The brutal intervention in Southeast Asia raised disturbing questions about our foreign policy and its relationship to domestic politics permeated by racism,” Gee remembered. “Everyone was lost in the larger rally,” Ichioka added. “We figured if we rallied behind our own banner, behind an Asian American banner, we would have an effect on the larger public.”
This course is about how the “hot” Cold War, including the war in Southeast Asia, gave rise to a panethnic, often anti-imperial Asian American literature. It considers how the American wars in Asia led Gee, Ichioka, and other young Americans of Asian descent to lift a new banner of belonging and resistance. From the Korean War novels of Richard Kim and Susan Choi to the Vietnam War novels of Monique Truong and Viet Nguyen, we explore how first- and second-generation Korean and Vietnamese American writers revisit and reimagine the wars that brought them and their families to the United States, often without a choice. This course is about Asian American literature and the Cold War––how the Korean and Vietnam Wars gave form to Asian American literature and how Asian American literature rewrites the Cold War.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Laura Poitras, 2012.
Topics in Literary Journalism: “Reporting the National Security State”
Spring 2017
On September 16, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney sat down for an interview with Meet the Press host Tim Russert. Russert asked Cheney, a former secretary of defense, how the Bush administration planned to respond to the 9/11 attacks. “We’re going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” the vice president answered. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussions, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in.” Later that week, President Bush signed his first authorization for use of military force, or AUMF, which still, sixteen years later, remains in effect.
This course asks how reporters have tracked down leads, written books, and made movies in the shadows of the national security state. Jane Mayer, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Fred Kaplan, and Alex Gibney take us into that covert “world” that Cheney wanted Americans to know existed––he alluded to it on national TV––but never know. Through reported books, articles, and documentaries, we explore how writers and filmmakers have constructed stories out of material that, at least at first glance, seems to resist being told. This course spends time in the shadows, where we read the national security state, wherever we can.
To view a PDF of an abbreviated syllabus, please click here.
Other Courses Taught
American Literature since 1880
Seminar in Writing through Literature
Seminar in Academic Writing
