Summer 2013
Anita Wheeler
"Introduction to International and Area Studies"
International and Area Studies 1
Introduction to international and area studies from interdisciplinary framework, covering themes related to international politics and markets, as well as international societies and cultures, to illuminate and clarify profoundly international character of world we live in and to introduce set of contemporary issues and challenges that cross borders and affect every region of world.
"Introduction to Global Studies"
Global Studies 1
Introduction to phenomenon of globalization and broad range of cultural, economic, political, and social issues confronting globalized world today. Structured around three thematic categories -- culture and society, governance and conflict, and markets -- designed to capture principal dimensions of multifaceted connections among nation-states, nongovernmental organizations, ethnic, cultural, and religious groups, and populations around world.
Spring 2013
Anita Wheeler
"Variable Topics Seminar-- The Rising Powers: Brazil, Russia, India and China"
Global Studies 188B
Brazil, Russia, India, China and arguably South Africa have shifted power in the international system away from the G7 countries. This seminar course will address this shift and situate it within wider debates and processes around the changing nature of the international system, the politics of development, and the political relations of ‘South-South’ globalization.
Chase Smith
"Race and Sexuality in Literature from the American Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance"
English M101B/Gender Studies M105B/LGBTS M101B
This course will investigate how race and sexuality are represented in U.S. literature from the American Renaissance through the Harlem Renaissance (1830s-1930s). We will approach literature as an important arena for reflecting on the conditions of social life for those marked as racial and sexual outsiders. Our readings of novels, poems, and short stories from across this period will especially focus on how the divisions between “white” and “black” as well as “heterosexual” and “homosexual” become established and also change significantly over time. The goal of this course is not to transpose present-day “queer” identities onto this literary archive, its authors, or its subjects. Instead, we will consider how literature written from the antebellum through the Jim Crow eras narrate desires, behaviors, embodiments, and practices that reveal and disrupt social norms in some way. Authors may include: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, and Nella Larson.
Winter 2013
JoAnne Ruvoli
"Italian Migrations and Interethnic Encounters"
Italian 42B
This course will provide an overview of Italian cultural and political developments from the mid-18th century to present through examining how elements of Italian society traveled and transformed through mass migration movements. Focusing on the interethnic encounters of migrants who navigate from honor-based societies both in Italy and in Italian American communities, we will examine how alliances and conflicts shape the movements of people, goods and ideologies and construct the transnational circuits of Italian American culture. Our inquiry will examine incidents of interethnic collaborations and conflicts for how the experiences of Italians and Italian Americans engage with the changing sociological contexts of Italy and the United States, and transform according to the ever-shifting attitudes toward race, class and gender in each location. Between the powerful folklore and violent reality, we will read historical and anthropological essays, novels, letters, memoirs, and films.
Anita Wheeler
"Special Topics in IR--Africa and China’s Contemporary Relations"
Political Science 139/Global Studies 160
This course explores the contemporary components of African countries’ diplomatic, economic, and cultural relations with China from the 1950s to the present. Students critically examine the foreign policies of African nations and China with a particular focus on how those policies impact local communities in Africa. The nature of this relationship raises questions about China’s ‘intentions’ in Africa—‘Is this a new scramble for Africa?’ Students employ a multidisciplinary analysis of Sino-African relations to unpack and then deliberate on the complexities of Africa and China’s relationship.
Alvin Wong
"Transnational Queer Studies: Texts, Theory, and Cultural Politics"
Comparative Literature 191/ LGBTS 187
This seminar focuses on the intersections between transnational studies and queer theory by exploring the following concepts and issues: genealogy, capitalism, colonial modernity, the archive, gay travels and tourism, representation, queer diasporas, and “queer Asia(s).” Theoretical studies by Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Eng, Munoz, and Rubin are placed alongside queer cultural productions in Asian/American, East Asian, Southeast Asian, and other non-Western contexts. By inquiring after the geopolitics of sexuality in films and novels such as Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, Deepa Mehta’s Fire, Stanley Kwan’s Lan Yu, and others, we can begin to trace the paralleled emergence of queer cultures in national markets and sites outside the West. At the same time, we also pay close attention to queer desires within specific local, translocal, and national contexts where colonial capitalism and neocolonialism both enable and circumscribe subject formations. The seminar invites participants to situate “queerness” as an ever-shifting formation that exists within older forms of modernity and contemporary forms of globalization.
Fall 2012
Jerome Camal
"Caribbean Popular Music"
Ethnomusicology 292B
The course explores popular musics of the Caribbean basin from sonic, kinesic, and theoretical perspectives, with a special emphasis on contemporary forms such as Trinidadian calypso and soca, Dominican bachata, or Jamaican dancehall reggae. We also attend to transnational styles which have had a special impact on North American music, reggaeton most particularly. In addition to reading recent scholarship in Caribbean music studies, we survey key texts by anthropologists as well as cultural and postcolonial theorists such as Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo. Together these readings enable us to engage with the lasting impact of colonialism, internal and international politics, tourism, migration, and technology on the development and significance of musical styles. Furthermore, by investigating important concepts in the study of Caribbean culture such as hybridity, creolization, and diaspora, this course will demonstrate how the Caribbean remains an important crucible for the wider ontological and epistemological understanding of identity categories like race, gender, and nationality.
JoAnne Ruvoli
"Transnationalism and Beat Literature: Writing Italian American Currents"
English 134/Italian 102C
This course will examine transnational issues in the literature of the Beat Movement paying special attention to the Italian American writers Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Diane Cavallo and Helen Barolini. We will also look at how Italy, the Italian language and representations of the Italian American experience figured into writing by other Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and others. We will analyze how tensions between transnational and national identities circulate in American culture, how the Beat writers challenge these constructions, and what the experience of Italian Americans contributes to an understanding of the Beat movement.
Chase Smith
"Imagining the U.S.-Mexico Border"
English M191B/Chicana/o Studies M139
This course examines representations of the U.S.-Mexico border in literature and popular culture from the 19th through the 21st century. Since its formation after the U.S. conquest of Mexico in 1848, the border has remained a site where the terms of national membership and exclusion have been contested. Novels, films, postcards, photographs, TV shows, and other media have played important roles in shaping ideas about this geopolitical line and its relationship to national identity, for mexicanas/os, Latina/os and Chicana/os, and other borderlands groups. Our texts include María Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885); postcards of the Mexican Revolution (1911-1917); the film Touch of Evil (1958); José Villareal's novel Pocho (1959); Luis Valdez’s film Zoot Suit (1979); Cherríe Moraga’s play Heroes and Saints (1994); and episodes from Ugly Betty and National Geographic's Border Wars. Throughout our readings of this range of media, we will be asking how certain stories about the border become authoritative History and how others exist alongside, converge with, and write against these dominant narratives. We will consider how such cultural texts do not simply mirror but actively map out, produce, reproduce, and remember narratives of national origins and also generate visions of national futures. Our analysis will especially consider how the categories of race, gender, and citizenship are at work from one cultural form to another and how these categories shift in relation to the shifting borderline itself.
Alvin Wong
"Gender and Sexuality in Modern Chinese Literature and Film"
Comparative Literature 191
This course explores the situatedness of gender, sex, and sexuality within colonial modernity, European and Japanese imperialism, nationalist patriarchy, transnational encounters, capitalist economic globalization, and China’s postsocialist integration into the global order. The course invites us to consider literature and films as “social texts” that map dialectical relation to the historical “real.” We will draw on theoretical work in history, literary studies, queer theory, film theory, and transgender studies by Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Michel Foucault, Miriam Hansen, Lydia Liu, Joan Scott, and Gayle Salamon. Texts covered include May Fourth writers and women’s writings, 1930s Shanghai cinema, postsocialist Chinese, and post-Martial Law Taiwan literature by Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Ding Ling, Mao Dun, Xiao Hong, Eileen Chang, Wang Xiaobo, Chu Tien-wen, and Wei Hui. Overall, students will acquire new analytical tools to critically rethink normative categories of gender, sex, and sexuality beyond the essentialisms of nation, kinship, heterosexuality, and determinism of “history.”
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