LAS-1105 Race in American Culture
Race: the salience of American culture and identity, yet an infinitely mutable category, shaped by power, avarice, and fear. The best antidote to this confusion and injustice? Our vast archives of race-millions of voices, most forgotten, but all still calling to us.
In this course, we will recuperate some of these voices and glimpse the ways that social categories are created by political, economic, and cultural histories. Our ultimate concern is to put these
histories to work in understanding our current moment in American cultural life.
We begin with early American contact between Africans and Europeans. The rest of the course considers more recent history.
Our interest is both in the specifics of the individual encounters, and in broader patterns across American history and culture. We will see that initial contact is usually followed by conflict and othering--and always by mutual influence. No groups were merely passive, and contact always led to dialectics of cultural hybridity. We will gain an appreciation for the ways that all Americans are culturally miscegenated-all of us have emerged from encounters between distinct and in some ways opposed groups.