American Studies

Courses

AMST 600a, American Scholars  Tavia Nyong'o

“What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar, 1837. A half-century ago American studies was a movement; now it is an institution. But it remains an anomaly in the academy, with neither method nor discipline: a modest program, not a department, that immodestly claims the space between disciplines, beyond disciplines, and perhaps encompassing disciplines. In the early days, American studies was imagined as a home for Emerson’s American scholar; these days Emerson’s scholar is apt to be eyed more skeptically. Nevertheless the philosophy of the street and the meaning of household life continue to be the topics of the time, and American studies remains an oddly Emersonian place for nurturing intellectuals. To explore the various kinds of American scholars and American studies, the American Scholars colloquium meets weekly. Each week, we ask a member of the American Studies faculty: What are the key works that shape your intellectual project? What works pose the crucial issues? What works engage what you would really know the meaning of? Each speaks briefly and leads a discussion of the works chosen. There is no writing assignment, and students receive a credit for participating. This course is mandatory for first-year American Studies graduate students.
W 9:25am-11:15am

AMST 622a and AMST 623b / CPLT 622a, Working Group on Globalization and Culture  Michael Denning

A continuing yearlong collective research project, a cultural studies “laboratory.” The group, drawing on several disciplines, meets regularly to discuss common readings, develop collective and individual research projects, and present that research publicly. The general theme for the working group is globalization and culture, with three principal aspects: (1) the globalization of cultural industries and goods, and its consequences for patterns of everyday life as well as for forms of fiction, film, broadcasting, and music; (2) the trajectories of social movements and their relation to patterns of migration, the rise of global cities, the transformation of labor processes, and forms of ethnic, class, and gender conflict; (3) the emergence of and debates within transnational social and cultural theory. The specific focus, projects, and directions of the working group are determined by the interests, expertise, and ambitions of the members of the group, and change as its members change. There are a small number of openings for second-year graduate students. Students interested in participating should contact
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 624b / AFAM 649b / ENGL 918b / WGSS 624b, Psychoanalysis and the Critical Tradition in the Humanities  Greta LaFleur

This seminar introduces students to major works in the psychoanalytic tradition, including but not limited to works by Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan. It is designed to allow graduate students to develop better fluency in psychoanalytic vernaculars, frameworks, and large-scale theories in order to gain a deeper and more nuanced appreciation of the persistence of psychoanalytic ways of thinking in the broader critical tradition in the humanities. Importantly, this is not a seminar dedicated solely to the psychoanalytic tradition; rather, it introduces students to seminal works by some of the major thinkers of early twentieth-century psychoanalytic thought in order to build a basis from which to understand the impact of psychoanalysis on the development of later twentieth-century critical movements, including woman-of-color feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and black studies. In other words, the course provides a graduate-level introduction to the intellectual history and critical aftermath of psychoanalysis as a field of thought. It pays special attention to understanding psychoanalytic theories of the self, the subject, and the abject (among others), and putting these modes of conceptualizing the subject into conversation with both contemporaneous and later theories of subjectivity (materialist, Foucauldian, etc.). Readings include works by Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Lacan, Jean Laplanche, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Kaja Silverman, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, Elizabeth Grosz, and others. Assignments include a midterm annotated bibliography and a 20–25-page final research paper. This course satisfies the “theory” course requirement for the Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 637a / ANTH 647a / WGSS 652a, Transnationalism and Mobility: Theories and Paradigms  Inderpal Grewal

This course focuses on transnational research by examining its theoretical and methodological reliance on paradigms of “mobility.” Based on concepts coming from migration studies, ethnic and race studies, postcolonial studies, and critical theory, transnational research has now become ubiquitous. Much of this work in its most exciting manifestations works against traditional approaches to nation, area, and migration, providing new ways to conceptualize subjects, states, epistemologies, and ontologies. It has also emerged within the disciplines with practitioners who think not in term of comparative or area research, but through flows, movements, networks, and unstable boundaries. The course examines the importance of this body of research in understanding histories and genealogies of colonialism and modernity. We also look at how historians are producing exciting work that refuses to remain within the boundaries of international area studies; anthropologists who are redrawing the “field” of research; and, importantly, the emergence of a feminist approach to transnationalism and mobility that has also impacted WGSS. The course brings together a broad area of research that looks at the ways in which modernity—especially Western modernity—has included conceptualizations of movement and speed, travel and mobility. We investigate these mobile modernities to understand also what is seen as outside such modernity. In doing so, the course brings an interdisciplinary feminist cultural analysis to theories of transnationalism and postcoloniality.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

AMST 645b / AFAM 723 / CPLT 949 / WGSS 645, Caribbean Diasporic Intellectuals

This course examines work by artists and writers of Caribbean descent from different regions of the transatlantic world. In response to contemporary interest in issues of globalization, the premise of the course is that in the world maps of these black intellectuals we can see the intertwined and interdependent histories and relations of the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Thinking globally is not a new experience for black peoples, and we need to understand that what is represented as “Caribbeanness” is a condition of movement. Literature and art are most frequently taught within the boundaries of a particular nation, but this course focuses on the work of writers and artists who shape the Caribbean identities of their characters as traveling black subjects and refuse to restrain their work within the limits of any one national identity. We practice a new and global type of cognitive mapping as we read and explore the meanings of terms like black transnationalism, migrancy, globalization, and empire. Diasporic practice embraces and represents the geopolitical realities of the modern, modernizing, and postmodern worlds in which multiple racialized histories are inscribed on modern bodies.
HTBA

AMST 650a / HIST 807a, Resistance, Rebellion, and Survival Strategies in Modern Latin America  Gilbert Joseph

An interdisciplinary examination of new conceptual and methodological approaches to such phenomena as peasants in revolution, millenarianism, “banditry,” refugee movements, and transnational migration.
F 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 679b / AFAM 648b, Accounting for Black Life  Hazel Carby

In this seminar we consider a variety of contemporary works that challenge and transcend how blackness and black lives have been historically constituted and limited through frameworks of loss, trauma, social death, or erasure. We engage their theoretical and methodological approaches to rethinking the boundaries of the human, innovative practices in the archive and think creatively about the form in which we narrate pastness and futurity. Readings include unpublished sections from Jennifer Morgan’s new work, Reckoning with Women in Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Modern Black Atlantic, and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (both Morgan and Hartman have agreed to visit the seminar); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive; Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents; Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images; Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle; and Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human.
M 9:25am-11:15am

AMST 686b / AFAM 605b / HIST 769b, Introduction to Documentary Studies  Zareena Grewal

This mixed graduate/undergraduate seminar surveys documentary work in three media—film, photography, and sound—since the 1930s, focusing on the documentary both as a cultural form with a history of its own and as a parcel of skill sets and storytelling and production practices to be studied and mastered. Readings and discussions cover important scholarly approaches to documentary as a genre, as well as close readings of documentaries themselves and practitioners’ guides to various aspects of documentary work. Topics include major trends in documentary practice across the three media, documentary ethics, aesthetics and truth-claims, documentary’s relationship to the scholarly disciplines and to journalism, and documentary work as political activism. Class meetings include screenings/viewings/soundings of documentary works, and practitioners’ panels and workshops with Yale documentarians (including Charles Musser, Zareena Grewal, Elihu Rubin, Gretchen Berland, and Laura Wexler) and local New Haven documentarians such as Jake Halpern (Yale ’97, This American Life). Students’ final projects may take the form of a traditional scholarly paper on some aspect of documentary history or a particular documentary producer, or an actual piece of documentary work—a film treatment, a brief video, a set of photographs, a sound documentary, or script.
TTh 4pm-5:15pm, M 7pm-9pm

AMST 690b / WGSS 629b, Politics of Reproduction  Rene Almeling

Reproduction as a process that is simultaneously biological and social, involving male and female bodies, family formation, and powerful social institutions such as medicine, law, and the marketplace. Sociological research on reproductive topics such as pregnancy, birth, abortion, contraception, infertility, reproductive technology, and aging. Core sociological concepts used to examine how the politics of reproduction are shaped by the intersecting inequalities of gender, race, class, and sexuality.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 705b / HIST 582b / RLST 705b, Readings in Religion in American Society, 1600–2018  Tisa Wenger

This seminar explores intersections of religion and society in American history from the colonial period to the present as well as methodological problems important to their study. It is designed to give graduate students a working knowledge of the field, ranging from major recent studies to bibliographical tools. In short, the seminar is a broad readings course surveying religion in American history from colonization to the present. It is not a specialized research seminar, but it does require a basic understanding of historiography.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 706a / AFAM 738a / HIST 711a / WGSS 716a, Readings in African American Women’s History  Crystal Feimster

The diversity of African American women’s lives from the colonial era through the late twentieth century. Using primary and secondary sources we explore the social, political, cultural, and economic factors that produced change and transformation in the lives of African American women. Through history, fiction, autobiography, art, religion, film, music, and cultural criticism we discuss and explore the construction of African American women’s activism and feminism; the racial politics of the body, beauty, and complexion; hetero- and same-sex sexualities; intraracial class relations; and the politics of identity, family, and work.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 709b, The Migrant Justice Initiative  Alicia Camacho

This course serves as a research colloquium for graduate students interested in migration, state sovereignty, and border construction in North America. It combines scholarly readings, cultural texts, and documentary projects related to the current regime of militarized immigration enforcement. The course focuses on theorizing a migrant-centered account of the forces shaping human mobility and social expulsion in the Americas. Students obtain methodological training in methods of cultural and social documentation, with an emphasis on the Latin American genres of testimonio, the crónica, and other narrative forms. Together we develop strategies for scholarly engagement with social movements, advocacy organizations, and policy makers. The course features talks by leading scholars in the fields of Latin American and Latinx migration studies. Prerequisite: facility with speaking and reading Spanish. Enrollment limited to graduate students.
T 9:30am-11:25am

AMST 710b / AFAM 588b / ENGL 948b, Autobiography in America  Robert Stepto

A study of autobiographical writings from Mary Rowlandson’s Indian captivity narrative (1682) to the present. Classic forms such as immigrant, education, and cause narratives; prevailing autobiographical strategies involving place, work, and photographs. Authors include Franklin, Douglass, Jacobs, Antin, Kingston, Uchida, Balakian, Als, and Karr.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 711b, Framing Global American Studies: Hemispheric, Oceanic, Archipelagic  Lisa Lowe

In this seminar we examine the various stakes of globalizing American studies and consider the critical emphases and erasures that attach to particular approaches, whether transnational, transatlantic, transpacific, hemispheric, continental, archipelagic, or other geopolitical frames for the global. We consider the ramifications of emphasizing spatial metaphors for the global, and we query the relationship of such frames to histories of race, indigeneity, colonialism, immigration, diaspora, and empire. Readings include A. Goldstein, ed., Formations of United States Colonialism; C. Levander and R. Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies; B. Roberts and M. Stephens, eds., Archipelagic American Studies; J. Hoskins and V. Nguyen, eds., Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field; as well as work by P. Gilroy, K. McKittrick, O.N. Tinsley, E.M. Dillon, K.-H. Chen, L. Yoneyama, J. Byrd, M.J. Saldaña-Portillo, M. Gómez-Barris, S. Smallwood, M. Karuka, V. Bald, and others.
W 3:30pm-5:30pm

AMST 715a / AFAM 764a / HIST 715a, Readings in Nineteenth-Century America  David Blight

The course explores recent trends and historiography on several problems through the middle of the nineteenth century: sectionalism, expansion; slavery and the Old South; northern society and reform movements; Civil War causation; the meaning of the Confederacy; why the North won the Civil War; the political, constitutional, and social meanings of emancipation and Reconstruction; violence in Reconstruction society; the relationships between social/cultural and military/political history; problems in historical memory; the tension between narrative and analytical history writing; and the ways in which race and gender have reshaped research and interpretive agendas.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 719a, Interrogating the Crisis of Islam  Zareena Grewal

In official and unofficial discourses in the United States, diagnoses of Islam’s various “crises” are ubiquitous, and Muslim “hearts and minds” are viewed as the “other” front in the War on Terror. Since 9/11, the U.S. State Department has made the reform of Islam an explicit national interest, pouring billions of dollars into USAID projects in Muslim-majority countries, initiating curriculum development programs for madrasas in South Asia, and establishing the Arabic Radio Sawa and the satellite TV station Al-Hurra to propagate the U.S. administration’s political views as well as what it terms a “liberal” strain of Islam. Muslim Americans are also consumed by debates about the “crisis” of Islam, a crisis of religious authority in which the nature and rapidity of change in the measures of authority are felt to be too difficult to assimilate. This course maps out the various and deeply politically charged contemporary debates about the “crisis of Islam” and the question of Islamic reform through an examination of official U.S. policy, transnational pulp Islamic literature, fatwas and essays authored by internationally renowned Muslim jurists and scholars, and historical and ethnographic works that take up the category of crisis as an interpretive device.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AMST 729b / FILM 810b / WGSS 746b, Visual Kinship: Families and Photographs  Laura Wexler

Exploration of the history and practice of family photography from an interdisciplinary perspective. Study of family photographs from the analog to the digital era, from snapshots to portraits, and from instrumental images to art exhibitions. Particular attention to the ways in which family photographs have helped establish gendered and racial hierarchies and examination of recent ways of reconceiving these images.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

AMST 731a / AFAM 763a / HIST 747a, Methods and Practices in U.S. Cultural History  Matthew Jacobson

. This sampling of U.S. cultural history from the early national period to the present is designed to unfold on two distinct planes. The first is a rendering of U.S