This is a syllabus that suggests readings for a course exploring histories of cultural resistance and activism in the United States from the colonial period to the present. Our hope is that teachers could use these readings to help their students understand the long historical context for present-day cultural movements. Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, kneeling Colin Kaepernick, and strikes by Uber drivers–all such modern movements are all a part of a long genealogy of cultural resistance.
Though histories of resistance movements often give in to the temptation of presenting a tale of progress and triumph, we have taken a different approach with the readings for this course. As the primary and secondary sources listed here demonstrate, resistance as a trajectory of step-by-step progress is oversimplified, naïve, and even dangerous, as it suggests that once a “victory” has been achieved, we can relax into complacency. But it is also not our goal to suggest that resistance is hopeless. These readings also demonstrate that activists have used whatever cultural means available to them to effect genuine change across generations.
Movements have victories and failures, they evolve or merge with other causes, they seem to fade and then reignite at different moments in history. Resistance can appear in surprising places, like family relationships, fashion choices, or music. Sometimes counterculture resistance in one decade becomes the dominant culture in another. Sometimes oppressed groups in one context become the oppressors in another. Cultures and forms of resistance also do not stand alone; they overlap, intertwine, learn from one another, cooperate and disagree, and sometimes share surprising parallels.
To reflect this complicated dynamic, we have organized this course thematically rather than chronologically. You will find readings in some weeks that might just as easily fit into another week–this reinforces the goal of this syllabus, to teach students that no movement exists in a bubble, no form of resistance is independent from other cultural, social, political, or familial influences and connections.
The course takes “culture” and “resistance” at their broadest definitions. We are less interested in defining with exact precision where “culture” and “resistance” begin and end and more interested in exploring possibilities and probing tough questions. There are times when an activist movement or a set of subversive behaviors seem particularly “cultural”–fashion and music as counterculture, for example. Other moments might appear less “cultural” and more comfortable in the realm of politics. We’ve found these distinctions largely unhelpful. By placing familiar and unfamiliar events in the realm of cultural history, we’ve tried to illustrate how Americans have subverted the status quo and imagined alternative realities through their everyday labor, their entertainments and amusements, their belief systems and social behaviors. In a way, “culture” is what you make it. It is, most of the time, somewhere at the intersection of expression, ideology, and power.
In general, we see “resistance” as any kind of response to a cultural threat–a reaction to a perceived power that might undermine, absorb, or destroy a group’s cultural values. Resistance can operate at any scale, from tiny daily subversions to mass movements. Resistance does not only lie in the domain of the oppressed–the powers that be can (and have) mobilized their cultural power in response to perceived threats, too.
NOTE: This syllabus contains far more reading than any course could hope to cover, but we hope it will serve as a helpful jumping-off point. For each week, we have narrowed the primary and secondary sources to several “required” readings, and then listed additional “recommended” readings below those.
Week 1: Introduction to Cultural Histories of Resistance
What is culture? What is resistance? What is cultural resistance? In the course’s introductory week, we explore definitions and guiding questions. These theoretical readings offer takes on each of these questions, from James Scott’s work on the resistance of oppressed groups, to Althusser’s exploration of exactly what they might be resisting. Lawrence Levine and Natalie Zemon Davis, in essays from a 1992 roundtable in the American Historical Review, introduce students to the concept of cultural history. Together, these readings introduce big-picture concepts that we hope students will continue to unpack throughout the course.
- Levine, Lawrence. “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,” American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (December 1992), 1369-1399.
- Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Toward Mixtures and Margins,” American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (December 1992), 1409-1416.
- Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “The Power of the Story.” In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1995.
- Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. 142-147 and 166-176.
Week 2: Indigenous Resistance
This week will trace how indigenous peoples in North America endured a centuries-long project to obliterate their cultural worlds and expropriate their ancestral lands. The primary sources will show how Natives thought pragmatically about their encounters with colonizers but also fought hard to retain their spiritual and cultural norms. We’ll see how the Spanish empire’s dreams of peaceful conversion and the United States’ official policy of conquest drew largely on formations of cultural difference. We’ll see how Natives came to understand that the invaders in their territories were not just out to steal their land; they were bent on “reforming” them. And, finally, we’ll see how the civil rights movements of the twentieth century stirred Natives to dramatically imagine indigenous futures, rather than lament tragic pasts.
- Excerpts from Pablo Tac’s Indian Life and Customs at Mission San Luis Rey: A Record of California Mission Life by Pablo Tac, An Indian Neophyte (1835). [In Lisbeth Haas, Pablo Tac, Indigenous Scholar: Writing on Luiseño Language and Colonial History, c. 1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)]
- Wooden Leg’s (Cheyenne) account of the Battle of Little Bighorn [In Deverell and Hyde, Shaped by the West: A History of North America, Vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), p. 28-32]
- Sermon from Wovoka, prophet of Ghost Dance religion [In Mooney’s The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak (Washington: GPO, 1896) p. 781]
- Tommy Orange in The Nation, “A Letter to Marlon Brando About Putting an Indian on the Oscar Stage”
- Alcatraz Occupation, “Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People”
- Winter counts
- James Young Deer’s “White Fawn’s Devotion”
- Excerpts from Black Elk Speaks
- Pictures of Ishi, the “last wild Indian of North America”
- Mapping Indigenous LA
- LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Boston: South End Press, 1999.
- Haas, Lisbeth. Saints and Citizens: Indigenous Histories of Colonial Missions and Mexican California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
- Deloria, Philip J. Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
- Warren, Louis. God’s Red Son. New York: Basic Books, 2017.
- Kroeber, Theodora. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
- Estes, Nick. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso, 2019.
- Short, John Rennie. Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World. London: Reaktion Books, 2009.
- Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
- Burch, Susan. “Dislocated Histories: The Canton Asylum for Insane Indians.” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 2, no. 2 (2014): 141-62.
- Silver, Peter. Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. New York: Norton, 2008.
- Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
- Jacobs, Margaret. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.
- Jackson, Joe. Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.
- Johnson, Troy R. The Occupation of Alcatraz Island: Indian Self-Determination and the Rise of Indian Activism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
- Kelman, Ari. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
- Jacoby, Karl. “Part Three: Memory” in Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History. New York: Penguin, 2009. 189-273.
Week 3: Slavery and Emancipation
In recent years, historians of slavery have shifted this focus of studies of enslaved resistance from mass resistance to the everyday resistance of enslaved people, especially enslaved women. This transition centered Black people’s culture in discussions of resistance. From religion to dance, enslaved people’s culture represented their resistance to the institution of slavery and their dehumanization. After emancipation, freed people’s cultural practices acted as a site to demonstrate their personhood and freedom. These readings show students the complexities of enslaved and free(d) people’s resistance, how white and Black people conveyed and understood resistance through different types of cultural mediums, and how experiments in freedom both transformed and were informed by Black culture.
- National Humanities Center. “Slaves’ Resistance on Southern Plantations: Selections from WPA Narratives.” National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox. Last revised March 2007. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/text7/resistancewpa.pdf.
- Cornell University. “Freedom on the Move.” Accessed November 25, 2019. https://freedomonthemove.org/#about.
- Villanova University and Mother Bethel AME Church. “Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery.” Accessed November 25, 2019. https://informationwanted.org.
- Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Boston: Published for the Author, 1861. Digitized by University of North Caroline at Chapel Hill, Documenting the American South. https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html
- Gates, Henry Louis, ed. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: Signet, 2012.
- Camp, Stephanie. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
- Hunter, Tera. Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2017.
- Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
- Williams, Heather Andrea, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
- Harvey, Paul. Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011.
- Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
- Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage, 1976.
- Lindsey, Treva B. and Jessica Marie Johnson. “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom.” Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 169-195.
- Stevenson, Brenda E. “‘Marsa Never Sot Aunt Rebecca Down’: Enslaved Women, Religion, and Social Power in the Antebellum South.” The Journal of African American History 90, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 345-367.
Week 4: Carceral Cultures
States have often relied on detention and incarceration to maintain social control and power over its population. With legacies of enslavement as the roots of discipline and punishment in American history, this week investigates how the culture of the carceral state, and the resistance against it, has evolved over time. The carceral state concerns matters of surveillance and its technologies, including law enforcement, national security, and the military, and how these institutions consider discourses and ideas of race, gender, and age in establishing control over all domains of social life. The readings show how resistance movements against the carceral state push back on the state’s attempt to establish physical and figurative boundaries in public space, and speak out against the racism which the carceral state depends upon.
- Wells, Ida B. “The Convict Lease System” in The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. Chicago: Privately Published, 1893.
- “The Attica Liberation Faction Manifesto of Demands.” Race & Class 53, no. 2 (October 2011): 28–35. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0306396811414338#articleCitationDownloadContainer
- Film: 13th (2016) directed by Ava DuVernay
- Early California Cultural Atlas, “The Great California Indian Migration”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjmRR59vXjk&feature=youtu.be
- Lightning Long John song
- President Richard Nixon’s Speech on Drug Abuse, June 17, 1971. Richard Nixon Foundation, https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2016/06/26404/
- Jackson, George. Soledad Brother: the Prison Letters of George Jackson. New York :Coward-McCann, 1970.
- Chesimard, Joanne (Assata Shakur) “To My People”. The Black Scholar 5, no. 2 (1973): 16-18.
- Manion, Jen. Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
- Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
- Lytle Hernandez, Kelly. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
- Thompson, Heather Ann. Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. New York: Pantheon, 2016.
- Camp, Jordan. Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016.
- Warren, Wendy. New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. New York: Liveright, 2016.
- Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010.
- Collings-Wells, Sam. “How well-intentioned reforms could worsen mass incarceration,” The Washington Post, November 5, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/05/how-well-intentioned-reforms-could-worsen-mass-incarceration/.
- Johnson, Walter. “The Carceral Landscape,” in River of Dark Dreams. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. 209-243.
- Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.
- Foucault, Michel and Paul Rabinow “The Carceral,” “Panopticism,” and “Complete and Austere Institutions,” in The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
- Hayden, Erica Rhodes and Theresa R. Jach. Incarcerated Women: A History of Struggles, Oppression, and Resistance in American Prisons. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2017.
- Podcast: Jen Manion on her book Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/episode-080-jen-manion-libertys-prisoners-prisons-prison-life-early-america/
Week 5: Environmental
The environment has long been a site of conflict and its use a source of injustice. In recent years, environmental historians have increasingly moved beyond studies of so-called wilderness and conservation to focus on many different types of environments–and the inequality that has been built or introduced into many of them. These readings introduce students not only to histories of environmental injustice, but to cases in which minority groups have fought for access to a safe environment, whether in our national parks or in urban neighborhoods. They also explore the urgency of activists attempting to counter climate change.
- National Park Service. “Segregated Facilities, 1939-1950, Shenandoah National Park.” https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery.htm?pg=5994917&id=20B61590-155D-451F-6786CFBCF8DF232B
- Wilderness Act of 1964, Public Law 88-577 (16 U.S.C. 1131-1136), 88th Congress, Second Session, September 3, 1964. https://wilderness.net/learn-about-wilderness/key-laws/wilderness-act/default.php
- Letter from the Southwest Organizing Project Letter to the Group of 10 Environmental Organizations, March 16, 1990, https://www.ejnet.org/ej/swop.pdf
- Flint Water Advisory Task Force Report, March 23, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/23/us/document-Flint.html.
- “California Wildfires Map,” Los Angeles Times, https://www.latimes.com/wildfires-map/
- Elson Trinidad, “A Self-Guided Tour of the Los Angeles Aqueduct,” KCET, November 4, 2013, https://www.kcet.org/redefine/a-self-guided-tour-of-the-los-angeles-aqueduct
- “A North American Climate Boundary Has Shifted 140 Miles East Due to Global Warming,” Yale Environment 360, April 11, 2018. https://e360.yale.edu/digest/a-north-american-climate-boundary-has-shifted-140-miles-east-due-to-global-warming
- Bullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Inequality. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
- Brown, Phil and Faith I.T. Ferguson “‘Making a Big Stink:’ Women’s Work, Women’s Relationships, and Toxic Waste Activism.” Gender and Society 9, no. 2 (April 1995), 145-172.
- Jacoby, Karl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.
- Finney, Carolyn. Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
- Gioielli, Robert. Environmental Activism and the Urban Crisis: Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014.
- Pulido, Laura. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996.
- Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Bearing Witness or Taking Action? Toxic tourism and environmental justice,” in Reclaiming the Environmental Debate: The Politics of Health in a Toxic Culture, ed R. Hofrichter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. 275-300.
- Hay, Amy M. “A New Earthly Vision: Religious Community Activism in the Love Canal Chemical Disaster,” Environmental History 14, no. 3 (July 2009), 502-526.
- Spears, Ellen Griffith. Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
- Stoll, Mark. Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Savoy, Lauret. Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2015.
- McCammack, Brian. Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.
- Chiang, Connie Y. Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
- Christensen, Jon. “Climates of Adaptation and Justice,” KCET, April 20, 2018, https://www.kcet.org/shows/earth-focus/climates-of-adaptation-and-justice
- Knobloch, Frieda. The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
- Spence, Mark David. Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999
Week 6: Labor and Capitalism
This week’s materials encourage us to think about capitalism and labor beyond a problem of economy. Labor history of the United States highlights the intersectionality among a broad range of evolving sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural factors that shaped the country over time. Organized thematically, both primary and secondary sources focus on slavery, the formation and fragmentation of American working class, conflicts as well as shares of interests among workers, workers themselves, and capital, agency in the labor movement, unionization, working-class culture, race, and gender. Ultimately, these materials serve as a starting point for us to further explore the following question: How can we locate more precisely specific historical moments and actors regarding a group of people whom we call laborers?
- “African-American Laundry Women Go on Strike in Atlanta.” HERB: Resources for Teachers. Accessed December 2, 2019. https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/897.
- Photographs, National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C., https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-child-labor-committee/about-this-collection/.
- Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. Reissued. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2006. (Originally published by The Viking Press on April 14, 1939) https://www.worldcat.org/title/grapes-of-wrath/oclc/289946
- Chavez, Cesar. “An open letter to Los Angeles supporters asking them for their continued support of the Grape Strike.” 1968. California Digital Library, Charles E. Research Library, UCLA, Library Special Collections. http://dp.la/item/d8f88dff38301a20abf182cb024e8274.
- Organizing Committee Alaska Cannery Workers Union. “Notice to Alaska Cannery Workers in San Francisco asking for their participation in a union organizing meeting, ca. 1936-1937.” Pacific Northwest Historical Documents, PNW01233. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections. https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/pioneerlife/id/10313/rec/92
- “More than 140 Die as Flames Sweep Through Three Stories of Factory Building in Washington Place, New York Tribune, March 26, 1911, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1911-03-26/ed-1/seq-1/#words=STORIES+THROUGH+SWEEP+FLAMES+THREE
- Hana Layson and Leon Fink, “Chicago Workers During the Long Gilded Age,” Digital Collections for the Classroom, Newberry Library, https://dcc.newberry.org/collections/chicago-workers-during-the-long-gilded-age
- Hunter, Tera. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
- Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
- Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class In New York, 1789-1860. New York: Knopf, 1986.
- Enstad, Nan. Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018.
- Espana-Maram, Linda. Creating Masculinity In Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
- Loomis, Erik. A History of America in Ten Strikes. New York: The New Press, 2018.
- Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
- Ruíz, Vicki. From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women In Twentieth-Century America. 10th anniversary ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Jones-Rogers, Stephanie. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Week 7: Migration
Migration has been at the center of conversations for several decades, and certain policies written to curtail migration have been fueled by racist narratives that aim to sustain specific individuals in power while simultaneously pressing certain groups. Moreover, heightened anti-immigrant sentiments and subsequent violence have created fear within targeted communities. As a result, the voices and resistance of these individuals have often been disregarded until recently. These readings focus on individuals’ experiences as migrants and refugees, but also emphasizes the resilience of migrants and other activists. These individuals have not only fought for immigrant rights, but have transformed their spaces, cultures, communities, and relationships.
- Marquez, Jose and Luis Marquez.“An Excerpt From a 2011 Oral History Interview with a Father who Worked as a Bracero in Arizona and his Son (in Spanish).” From Digital Public Library of America, Courtesy of Yuma County (AZ) Library District via the Arizona Memory Project and Mountain West Digital Library. https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/mexican-labor-and-world-war-ii-the-bracero-program/sources/73. (accessed Dec. 1, 2019).
- “Rosalio Coronado Rodriguez Statement.” May 12, 1959. Ben Yellen Papers. MSS 193. Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego. https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb17414735.
- Rivera, Alex, Bernardo Ruiz, and Marcelo Zarvos. The Sixth Section: La Sexta Sección. New York, N.Y.: SubCine Independent Latino Film & Video, 2004.
- “Southwest Borderlands: Confluence and Conflict,” Many Voices, One Nation, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, https://americanhistory.si.edu/many-voices-exhibition/new-americans-continuing-debates-1965%E2%80%932000/southwest-borderlands
- “This Far by Faith. 1866-1945: from Emancipation to Jim Crow.” PBS. Public Broadcasting Service, 2003. https://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/journey_3/p_8.html.
- Starkweather, J.B., photographer. “Spanish Flat, 1852.” Daguerreotype. Ca. 1852. From California State Library: Digital Collection. Accessed Dec. 1, 2019) https://csl.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma990013790470205115&context=L&vid=01CSL_INST:CSL&lang=en
- Coalition of Immokalee Workers. “About CIW.” Accessed December 2, 2019. https://ciw-online.org/about/.
- García, María Cristina, Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
- Chavez-Garcia, Miroslava. Migrant Longing: Letter Writing Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
- Minian, Ana Raquel. Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.
- Best, Wallace D. Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
- Urrea, Luis Alberto. The Devil’s Highway: A True Story. New York: Little Brown, 2004.
- Goldring, Luin. “Gender, Status, and the State in Transnational Spaces: The Gendering of Political Participation and Mexican Hometown Associations.” in Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2003.
- Rosas, Ana Elizabeth. Abrazando El Espíritu: Bracero Families Confront the US-Mexico Border. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.
- Casillas, Dolores Inés. “Sounds of Surveillance: U.S. Spanish-Language Radio Patrols La Migra.” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 807–29. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2011.0047.
- Gonzales, Alfonso. Reform without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.
- Lew-Williams, Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018.
- Lim, Julian. Porous Borders: Multiracial Migrations and the Law in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
- Lozano, Rosina. An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.
Week 8: Urban
Urban history is complicated. Not only do urban policies and practices aim to form physical layouts and infrastructure, but they also intend to shape the class and racial demographics of cities. Through these discriminatory practices, people of color and the poor are often subjected to policies that negatively affect their neighborhoods, such as the building of a freeway to urban renewal. These readings focus on how residents have shaped their neighborhoods and cities despite certain racist policies. They raise questions about how cities shape people and how people shape cities.
- Instagram. “Rockarchivola.” Last modified November 30, 2019. https://www.instagram.com/rockarchivola/
- Marciano, R., D. Goldberg and C. Hou “T-RACES: a Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces.” Accessed December 1, 2019. http://salt.umd.edu/T-RACES
- “Marvin Gaye – Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).” Youtube video, 5:31. Posted by “Marvin Gaye,” July 5, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57Ykv1D0qEE.
- Du Bois, W.E.B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. (Originally published 1899)
- “The Great Wall of Los Angeles.” Judy Baca. Accessed December 1, 2019. http://www.judybaca.com/artist/portfolio/the-great-wall/.
- “Nas – N.Y. State of Mind.” Youtube video, 4:55. Posted by “NasOfficial,” May 19, 2017. https://youtu.be/hI8A14Qcv68.
- Offenhartz, Jake. “Photos, Videos: NYers Jump Turnstiles En Masse To Protest Police Brutality On The Subway.” Gothamist. Gothamist, November 2, 2019. https://gothamist.com/news/decolonizefareevasionnprotest.
- Pardo, Mary. “Mexican American Women Grassroots Community Activists: ‘Mothers of East Los Angeles.’” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 11, no. 1 (1990): 1-7. doi:10.2307/3346696.
- Avila, Eric. The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
- Sandoval Strausz, A.K. Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City. New York: Basic Books, 2019.
- Isenberg, Alison. Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
- Lipsitz, George. How Racism Takes Place. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.
- McNeur, Catherine. Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
- Heap, Chad. Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
- Johnson, Gaye Theresa. Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial Entitlement In Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
- Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity In Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- Henkin, David M. City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
- Williams, Rhonda.“Black Women, Urban Politics, and Engendering Black Power.” In The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era, edited by Peniel E. Joseph, 79-103. New York: Routledge, 2006.
- Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—And Why It Matters. New York: BasicCivitas, 2008.
- Zipp, Samuel. Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Week 9: Technology
Technologies can offer incredible tools for mobilizing resistance, but they can also serve as tools of domination that activists fight against. These readings offer an exploration of both sides of the debate, from how activists have used a wide range of tools to organize resistance, to how technology companies have built unjust divisions into those very same tools. This week also touches on the question of how to document and remember these sometimes ephemeral forms of resistance.
- Brand, Stewart. The Whole Earth Catalog (Fall 1968), https://archive.org/details/1stWEC-complete/page/n2
- Documenting Ferguson, Washington University Special Collections, http://documentingferguson.wustl.edu/omeka/items/browse?collection=62
- Documenting the Now, Shift Design, Inc., University of Maryland, University of Virginia
- Armitage, Susie. “2016 Was the Year Black Lives Matter Went Global,” (tweets from BLM). December 8, 2016, Buzzfeed News, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/susiearmitage/2016-was-the-year-black-lives-matter-went-global.
- Carnes, Greta Carnes. “Digital Organizing Campaign Tools in 2018: A Guide for Organizing Teams, Campaigns, and Candidates,” National Democratic Training Committee, https://traindemocrats.org/digital-organizing/
- Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
- Leonard, David and Suey Park. “Toxic or Intersectional?: Challenges to (White) Feminist Hegemony Online.” In Are All the Women Still White? Rethinking Race, Expanding Feminisms, edited by Janell Hobson. New York: SUNY Press, 2016.
- Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Teargas: The Ecstatic, Fragile Politics of Networked Protest. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
- Lebron, Christopher J. The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
- Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
- Benjamin, Walter. “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” from Illuminations trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217-252.
- Fouché, Rayvon. “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud: African Americans, American Artifactual Culture, and Black Vernacular Technological Creativity.” American Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2006): 639-661. doi:10.1353/aq.2006.0059.
- Hicks, Mar. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017.
- Miyatsu, Rose. “Archiving Digital Media: From Documenting Ferguson to Documenting the Now.” Washington University Special Collections, December 21, 2017.
- Abbate, Janet. “How the Internet lost its soul,” The Washington Post, November 1, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/01/how-internet-lost-its-soul/
Week 10: Gender
Gender, as historian Joan Scott memorably put it, can be a “useful category for historical analysis,” and the relationships between male and female (either actual or archetypal) can be used as a lens to understand all of history. This sentiment, we believe, comes across in much of the rest of this syllabus. This week, therefore, is for the explicit study of female cultures of resistance.
We first trace a classic narrative of the waves of American feminism with an article from Suffragist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the well-known Feminine Mystique and the excerpt from the controversial book Our Bodies, Ourselves (which we encourage our students to leaf through in its entirety). We then go beyond this narrative with an essay on intersectionality from Audre Lorde, the statement from the Combahee River Collective and the sensational modern documentary No Más Bebés. Our secondary readings accompany these pieces to explicate the history of feminism, intersectional feminism, the contested ground of the female reproductive system, and some general cultural histories specifically of women throughout the American 19th and 20th centuries.
- The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, “Our Changing Sense of Self” in Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women. 2nd ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976. 17-23.
- Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell, 1970.
- Smith, Barbara., and Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective Statement : Black Feminist Organizing In the Seventies and Eighties. lst ed. Latham N.Y.: Kitchen Table : Women of Color Press, 1986.
- Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984. 110-114.
- Tajima-Peña, Renee, dir. No Más Bebés. Los Angeles: Virginia Espino, 2015.
- Horowitz, Daniel. “Rethinking Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America.” American Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1996): 1-42.
- Murphy, Michelle. “Immodest Witnessing: The Epistemology of Vaginal Self-Examination in the U.S. Feminist Self-Help Movement.” Feminist Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 115-47.
- Jones, Jacqueline, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family From Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
- Ruíz, Vicki. Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987.
- Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women In San Francisco. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
- Martin, Emily. The Woman In the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.
- Reagan, Leslie J. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law In the United States, 1867-1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
- McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
- Lerner, Barron H. “I Alone Am in Charge of My Body” in The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure In Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 141-169.
- Tone, Andrea, Devices and Desires: a History of Contraceptives In America. New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 2001.
- Ruíz, Vicki. Las Obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 2000.
- Lindsey, Treva B. Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017.
- Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65-81.
- DuBois, Ellen Carol, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement In America, 1848-1869. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.
- Cherneff, Lila. “Repackaging the Pill.” 99% Invisible. Podcast audio, July 10, 2017. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/repackaging-the-pill/
- Weiss, Elaine. The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018.
- Takagi, Midori. “Consuming the “Orient”: Images of Asians in White Women’s Beauty Magazines, 1900-1930,” in K. Kennedy and S. Ullman, Sexual Borderlands: Constructing an American Sexual Past, edited by Kathleen Kennedy and Sharon Ullman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003): 303-319.
- Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
Week 11: Sexuality/Queer Culture
Immediately following “gender week,” our syllabus takes on the cultures of people who subvert gender expectations. Our primary sources introduce us to lesbian responses to third wave feminism, a well-known documentary on urban cultures of queer people of color, a devastating recounting of the AIDS epidemic and its effect on gay culture, a published diary of a queer African-American woman, and a series of controversial artworks depicting the Virgin Mary, sexed. Secondary sources explore these themes further, and recommended readings widen the field to include more treatments of sexuality itself, along with queer cultures.
- The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes” in Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women. 2nd ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976. 81-97.
- Livingston, Jennie, dir. Paris is Burning, Toronto: Off-White Productions, 1990.
- Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: Penguin Books, 1988.
- Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore, and Gloria T Hull. Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984.
- Lopez, Alma. “Lupe & Sirena.” Accessed November 29, 2019. https://almalopez.myportfolio.com/lupe-sirena
- Gibson, J.W. and Prof. and W.J. Truitt. Golden Thoughts on Chastity and Procreation including Heredity, Prenatal Influences, Etc., Etc. Washington, D.C.: Austin Jenkins Co., 1914.
- Baldwin, James, Giovanni’s Room. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
- GLBT Historical Society Museum and Archives “Online Collections,” Accessed November 29, 2019. https://www.glbthistory.org/online-collections.
- “The Gay Life Radio Show” in Randy Alfred subject files and sound recordings, 1991-24, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society. https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/glbt/12616
- Banaszynski, Jacqui. “AIDS in the Heartland: Chapters I, II and III” Twin Cities. Minneapolis/St. Paul: Pioneer Press, 1987. https://www.twincities.com/1987/06/21/aids-in-the-heartland-chapter-i/.
- Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.
- Manatakis, Lexi. “The Untold Stories of America’s Queer Chicano Art Scene.” Dazed, October 16, 2017.
- Riggs, Marlon, dir. Tongues Untied. San Francisco: Frameline, 1989.
- Cruse, Howard. The Complete Wendel. New York: Universe Pub., 2011. OR Cruse, Howard. Stuck Rubber Baby. London: Titan, 2011.
- Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.
- Halperin, David M., How to Be Gay. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.
- Hine, Darlene Clark. “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912-20.
- Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
- Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life In Twentieth-Century America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
- Canaday, Margot. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship In Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.
- Stryker, Susan. Transgender History. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008.
- Meyerowitz, Joanne J. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality In the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
- Cleves, Rachel Hope, Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage In Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Parédez, Deborah, “’Como la Flor’ Reprised: Queer Selenidad” in Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 2009.
- Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991.
- D’Emilio, John. “Capitalism and Gay Identity” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1993. 467-476.
- Mitchell, Michele, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
- Hull, Gloria T. Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers in the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
- Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. “‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives.” African American Review 40, no. 2 (2006): 223-37.
Week 12: The Culture Industry
The “culture industry” is a term coined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to explain the ways in which popular culture can be used to standardize visual (film, television, etc), auditory (radio, music, etc), and print (magazines, books, etc) cultures, among others, to coerce and control mass society. This week’s readings investigate the power dynamics of mass consumption and the institutions involved in this process, with particular focus on how cultures of resistance influence consumption and demand.
- LIFE Magazine cover of movie theater audience
- Groundswell is a dynamic network of oral historians, activists, cultural workers, community organizers, and documentary artists: http://www.oralhistoryforsocialchange.org/blog/2019/6/6/oral-history-can-bring-us-into-a-longer-arc-of-resistance-interview-with-benjamin-dangl
- Museums increasingly targeted as sites for protest: https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news-analysis/15052019-protests-in-museums
- Mary Carole McCauley, “Baltimore Museum of Art will only acquire works from women next year: ‘You have to do something radical’,” The Baltimore Sun, November 15, 2019, https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bs-fe-bma-female-artists-2020-20191115-33s5hjjnqfghzhmwkt7dqbargq-story.html
- Do the Right Thing. Directed by Spike Lee. Universal City: Universal Pictures, 1989.
- Patrick Ryan, “#OscarsSoWhite Controversy: What you need to know,” USA Today, February 2, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/movies/2016/02/02/oscars-academy-award-nominations-diversity/79645542/
- Lonetree, Amy. Decolonizing Museums:Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
- Spires, Derrick R. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
- Fielder, Brigitte, and Jonathan Senchyne, eds. Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.
- Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
- Lippert, Amy K DeFalco. Consuming Identities: Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
- Adorno, Theodor. “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” New German Critique (1975): 12-19.
- Gell, Alfred “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology” in The Art of Anthropology, Essays and Diagrams ed. Eric Hirsch. London: Athlone Press, 1999.
- Brown, Michael F. “Can culture be copyrighted?” Current Anthropology (1988), 39 (2):193–222.
- Graham, Sandra. Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
- Perry, Imani. May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Hill, 2018.
- Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
- Sandweiss, Martha A. Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
- Alridge, Derrick P. “From Civil Rights to Hip Hop: Toward a Nexus of Ideas.” The Journal of African American History 90, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 226-252.
- Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. United States: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Week 13: Aesthetics of Resistance
An aesthetics of resistance explores the ways in which beauty, fashion, and material culture have acted as modes of cultural expression and means of resistance in the U.S. Many of the people featured in these readings considered beauty, fashion, and material culture both personal and political. These readings show how consistent struggles over power, culture, space, and the body occurred, especially for marginalized people. The “Aesthetics of Resistance” week provides students with an intimate and personal lens into how individuals understood and interacted with ideas and practices of resistance.
- Smith, Melissa.“The Photos That Lifted the Black is Beautiful Movement.” The New York Times, November 27, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/lens/kwame-brathwaite-black-is-beautiful.html.
- Bolton, Andrew, Karen von Godtsenhoven, and Amanda Garfinkel. Camp: Notes on Fashion. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019.
- “[Mrs. Amelia Venigas – ‘pachuco woman.’ Cursed officers, charge against asserted Zoot-Suit shielder.]” Photograph. Los Angeles, c1943. TESSA: Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles Herald Examiner Photo Collection. https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/photos/id/8649/rec/21.
- Lopez, Alma, artist. Our Lady, 1999. Print. Alma Lopez. Accessed November 25, 2019. http://www.almalopez.com/ourlady.html
- American Anti-Slavery Society, American, 1830-1870. “Am I Not A Woman & A Sister” Anti-Slavery Hard Times Token. Copper token. 1838. Numismatic Collection. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/112836.
- “[Portrait of Ramona.]” Photograph. Los Angeles, c1944. TESSA: Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library, Shades of L.A. Photo Collection. https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/photos/id/80922/rec/16 (accessed December 2, 2019).
- “[Woman wearing a zoot suit.]” Photograph. Los Angeles, c1945. TESSA: Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library: Shades of L.A. Photo Collection. https://tessa.lapl.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/photos/id/80014/rec/7 (accessed December 2, 2019).
- Instagram. “Veteranas_and_rucas.” Last modified November 30, 2019. ://www.instagram.com/veteranas_and_rucas/?hl=en.
- Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp.’” The Partisan Review (Fall 1964): 515-530.
- Ford, Tanisha C. Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
- Parry, Tyler. “Broomsticks and Material Cultures of Cleanliness in American Slavery.” Black Perspectives, November 8, 2018. https://www.aaihs.org/broomsticks-and-material-cultures-of-cleanliness-in-american-slavery/.
- Roberts, Blain. Pageants, Parlours, and Pretty Women: Race and Beauty in the Twentieth-Century South. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
- White, Graham and Shane White. Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture, from its Beginning to the Zoot Suit. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
- Haulman, Kate. The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
Week 14: Civil Rights and Youth Culture
This week we’ll see the civil rights movements of the postwar era as a major shift in the cultural politics of the United States. Postwar conformity gave way to the sudden explosion of a vocal and aggressive youth culture. The usual forums for political discussion collapsed, and new venues opened up–the stage at Woodstock ‘69, where Jimi Hendrix sounded the horrors and angst of the Vietnam War in his explosively distorted guitar; the streets of Washington, D.C., where major figures and everyday people marched for their own humanity; and the streets of Los Angeles, where Chicanos framed their public protests as a “reconquista” of their homes and identities during the tumult of the Vietnam War. We’ll see how the music of the “counterculture” animated this rights activism and then, eventually, became mainstream culture. And we’ll see how the many civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s voiced the concerns and demands of oppressed and suppressed groups, and paved the way for activist cultures of the 21st century.
- Jimi Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock, 1969. YouTube video, 4:59. Posted [July 2008].
- Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Statement of Purpose,” Raleigh, North Carolina, 1960. http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/protest/text2/snccstatementofpurpose.pdf
- Stokeley Carmichael, “Black Power” speech (July 28, 1966). Encyclopedia.com.
- Gil Scott-Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” OR “Comment #1”
- Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University. “Who Speaks for the Negro? Oral History.” https://whospeaks.library.vanderbilt.edu/ (accessed January 9, 2020).
- Los Angeles Public Library. “National Chicano Moratorium.” August 29, 1970. Security Pacific National Bank Collection; Ethnic groups-Mexicans; A-010-161 4×5.
- Stokely Carmichael. “Hell no! We won’t go! Poster.” April, 1967. Pennsylvania State University, Special Collections Library.
- The Riot Grrrl Collection, Lisa Darms, ed., New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2014.
- Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC,Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner, eds., Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010.
- Guyot, Lawrence, Interviewee, Julian Bond, and U.S Civil Rights History Project. Lawrence Guyot oral history interview conducted by Julian Bond in Washington, D.C. 2010. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015669104/.
- Sugrue, Thomas J. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. New York: Random House, 2008.
- Alvarez, Luis. The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance During World War II. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
- Oropeza, Lorena. Raza Sí!, Guerra No!: Chicano Protest and Patriotism During the Vietnam War Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
- Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941-1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
- Parker, Traci. Department Stores and the Black Freedom Movement: Workers, Consumers, and Civil Rights from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
- Farmer, Ashley. “‘Heed the Call!’: Black Women, Anti-imperialism, and Black Anti-War Activism.” Black Perspectives, August 3, 2016: https://www.aaihs.org/heed-the-call-black-women-anti-imperialism-and-black-anti-war-activism.
- Baran, Nicole. “Jitterbugging with Jim Crow.” The Bitter Southerner. https://bittersoutherner.com/jitterbugging-with-jim-crow-lindy-hop-swing-music (accessed January 9, 2020).
- Davidson, Bill. “‘Hell, No, We Won’t Go!’: Protesting the Vietnam Draft in 1968.” Saturday Day Evening Post, June 23, 2017. https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/hell-no-wont-go-protesting-draft-1968/
Week 15: Culture Wars and Conservative Backlash
This week, we’ll invert the typical dynamic of resistance–we’ll see resistance not as a tool for exploited groups but a response by powerful and dominant groups to perceived threats. We’ll begin in the immediate postwar era with a discussion of “white flight,” particularly in the South. We’ll closely trace conservative responses to the civil rights movements covered in the previous week, and we’ll see how activism for economic and sexual rights produced activism against economic and sexual rights. Moving through the 1980s and 90s, we’ll see the conservative backlash of the Reagan and Clinton years as quintessential grievance politics. White evangelicals and “small-government” factions fueled the rise of the New Right and supplied new vocabularies for “resisting” cultural secularization and twenty-first century neoliberalism. We’ll take the period from 1945 to the present as a test case in how comfortably dominant groups aggressively protect their interests and articulate their right to hegemony through cultural language and behavior.
- Pat Buchanan. “Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Republican Convention Address.” C-SPAN. August 17, 1992.
- Klepacki, Linda. “A Look at the Sexual Revolution in the United States”. Focus on the Family. (accessed January 9, 2020).
- WTTW. “From the Archive: Phyllis Schlafly.” PBS.org. 1997.
- Phyllis Schlafly. “What’s Wrong with Equal Rights for Women?” The Phyllis Schlafly Report, February, 1972.
- Bageant, Joe. Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007.
- “Anita Bryant Pie in the Face.” YouTube video, 1:17. Posted [November 7, 2006].
- Chicago Daily News. “Would you panic if a Negro moved next door?,” Newberry Digital Exhibitions, July 10, 1962. http://publications.newberry.org/digital_exhibitions/items/show/96 (accessed January 10, 2020).
- Grossman, James. “Whose Memory? Whose Monuments? History, Commemoration, and the Struggle for an Ethical Past: Perspectives on History: AHA.” February 1, 2016.
- Dynasty. “The Honeymoon” Directed by Robert T. Thompson. Written by Edward DeBlasio and et al. ABC. January 19 1981.
- Top Gun. Directed by Tony Scott. Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1986.
- McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
- Kruse, Kevin M. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, Princeton University Press, 2005.
- Hartman, Andrew. A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
- Rolph, Stephanie R. Resisting Equality: The Citizens’ Council, 1954-1989, Louisiana State University Press, 2018.
- Hemmer, Nicole. Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
- Nickerson, Michelle. Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.
- Taranto, Stacie. Kitchen-Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family Values in New York, University of Pennsylvania Press, Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, 2017.
- Griffis, Chelsea, “‘In the Beginning Was the Word:’ Evangelical Christian Women, the Equal Rights Amendment, and Competing Definitions of Womanhood”. Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 38 (2): 148-172.
- Waller, Dahvi. Mrs. America. Airing April 15, 2020, Hulu. FX Productions.
- Martin, Douglas. “Phyllis Schlafly, ‘First Lady’ of a Political March to the Right, Dies at 92,” New York Times, September 5, 2016.
- Onion, Rebecca. “The Story of ‘Segregation Academies,’ as told by the white students who attended them,” Slate, November 7, 2019.
- Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. New York: Oxford University Press: 2004.
- Bonner, Robert E. Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002.
- Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783-90.
- Barot, Sneha, “Abortion Restrictions in U.S. Foreign Aid: The History and Harms of the Helms Amendment.” Guttmacher Policy Review 16, no. 3 (2013): 9.
Week 16: Importing and Exporting US Culture
Why and how should we study the cliché: the Americanization of global culture? This week’s materials encourage us to reconsider a few common myths on the shaping and movement of American culture; that American culture means white, Christian, and capitalist, that similar cultural phenomena which occurred elsewhere as in the United States were under the influence of American culture, and that the cultural exchange among the United States and other regions was natural rather than fruits of conscious efforts. While this week’s chronology privileges the second half of the 20th century, both primary and secondary sources illustrate the complicity of the origin of American culture, how the imbalance of geopolitical power worldwide and of cultural power in the United States shaped American culture and its movement, how the cultures of others shaped American identities, and how American culture appropriated others as well as being appropriated by others.
- A Kiss from Mary Pickford (Potseluy Meri Pikford). Directed by Sergei Komarov. Moscow: Mezhrabpom-Rus, 1927.
- Riesman, David. “The Nylon War” . 1993. In Abundance for What?, 67-79. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
- Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck (Para Leer al Pato Donald), Chile, 1971. Reissued by New York: OR Books, 2018. https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/donald-duck/.
- Little Vera (Malenkaya Vera). Directed by Vasili Pichul. Moscow: Gorky Film Studio, 1988.
- “Gangnam Style.” YouTube video, 4:12. Posted by “officialpsy,” July 15, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0.
- Ninotchka. Directed by Ernst Lubitch. Los Angeles: MGM, 1939.
- Eisenstaedt, Alfred. V-J Day in Times Square. 1945. Photography. Life, New York. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-J_Day_in_Times_Square#/media/File:Legendary_kiss_V%E2%80%93J_day_in_Times_Square_Alfred_Eisenstaedt.jpg.
- X [George Kennan], “Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs 4 (1947): 566–582.
- Raleigh, Donald. Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
- First Blood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIKcO4u5YmQ. Directed by Ted Kotcheff. Los Angeles: Orion Pictures, 1982.
- “Hong Kong Protest: Under the Anti-mask Law, How Do Hong Kong People Celebrate Halloween.” Youtube video, 2:55. Posted by “BBC in Chinese,” October 30, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geKaUYQ5ckQ.
- Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
- Crothers, Lane. Globalization and American Popular Culture, 4th ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and LIttlefield, 2018.
- Kelly, William W. “Is Baseball a Global Sport? America’s National Pastime’ as Global Field and International Sport.” Global Networks, no. 2 (2007): 187-201.
- Weinbaum, Alys E., Thomas, Lynn M., Ramamurthy, Priti, Poiger, Uta G., Dong, Madeleine Yue, and Tani E. Barlow, ed. 2008. The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press.
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