Formulations:
Interdisciplinarity and Knowledge Production in Ethnic Studies

[Theories of Ethnic Studies]

Ethnic Studies 200B                                                                          Ross Frank

Winter 2009                                                                                       Office:   SSB 227

Wednesday 10:00 – 12:50PM, SSB 253                                           Phone:   534-6646

                                                                                                            rfrank@weber.ucsd.edu

Download PDF version of the syllabus.

 

Course Description:

The Department of Ethnic Studies' Vision Statement calls for our engagement in "the fundamental theoretical and political questions regarding the critical conceptualization of social categories, particularly race, indigeneity, culture, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and nation." This class focuses on how to rethink these questions in a comparative, relational, and interdisciplinary fashion; an epistemology that concerns itself with disciplinarity, representation, and knowledge production.  Moving away from the invisibility-to-visibility model, which structures visibility as the penultimate goal, our task calls attention to the "minority" as unstable, unrepresentable, and unbelonging subjects who make transparent and thus destabilize the ideological investments of institutionally sanctioned disciplines.  The course uses model studies to explore how comparative and relational problems are posed as research projects, how research questions are constructed, and how they employ theory to frame the project and to establish what is at stake in the research.

 

Organization:

Weekly seminar assignments:

1)      Discussion:  attendance and active participation in the group discussions of the weekly readings during the seminar meetings.  Send 3 questions to pose for seminar discussion by Monday night each week to the presenters;

2)      Presentation:  lead two seminar discussions during the quarter;

3)      Response:  write two 4-5 page response papers  each covering the assigned readings for a week in which you presented.  Response papers are due at the beginning of class the week after your presentation;

4)      Journal:  an assignment in reading and analyzing Journals of use to Ethnic Studies scholarship (each person will present once, instructions distributed separately);

5)      Job Talks & Colloquium:  lead a brief discussion about a selected presenter in the seminar following the presentation.

 

Evaluation:  50% class discussions and 50% presentations and written work.

 

 

The Journey:

 

Assigned books available at Groundwork Books.

 

Week 1 — January 7:  Course Introduction

 

Week 2 — January 14:  The Unseen, Unacknowledged, and Haunted

Basso, Keith.  Wisdom Sits In Places: Landscape And Language Among The Western Apache.  University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

 

Week 3 — January 21:  Culture and Media: Intertextuality, Conjunctures, and Convergences

Melani McAlister. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. (Updated Edition, with a Post-9/11 Chapter.)  UC Press, 2005.

 

Week 4 — January 28:  The Postcolonial: Feminism, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis

Ann McClintock.  Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest.  Routledge, 1995.

 

Week 5 — February 4:  Queering Sociology: Queer of Color and the Critique of Liberal Capitalism

Roderick Ferguson.  Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

 

Week 6 — February 11:  Critical Anthropology: Border Ethnography, Transnational Flows, and the Nation

Robert Alvarez.  Mangos, Chiles, and Truckers : the business of transnationalism.  University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

 

Week 7 — February 18:  Critical Literary Studies:  Cultural Discourse and Representation

Sheila Marie Contreras.  Blood Lines: myth, indigenism, and Chicana/o literature. University of Texas Press, 2008.

 

Week 8 — February 25:  Indigenous Studies and Ethnic Studies

Andrea Smith.  Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances.  Duke, 2008.

 

Week 9 —  March 4:  Performance Studies: The Archive and the Repertoire

Diana Taylor.  The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas.  Duke, 2003.

 

Week 10 — March 11:  Racial Knowledge: The "Racial" in Post-Enlightenment Conditions

Denise Silva.  Toward a Global Idea of Race.  University of Minnesota Press, 2007.