Study the formation of the Dominican people from pre-Columbian times to 1844. It examines the main demographic, economic, social, political and ethno-cultural processes of the former Spanish colony of La Española / Santo Domingo as it evolved into a new nation state named Dominican Republic. Informed classroom discussions of reading assignments, oral presentation of summary of final research project, and final research paper.
3
This course addresses relevant issues pertaining to the socioeconomic development of Dominican society. It looks at the formation of the first European colony in the New World, the creation of the Dominican Republic, and the formation of the Dominican people. The course ends in 1930, with the arrival of Trujillo.
3
Survey of the construction of the Dominican Republic as a new nation state from its proclamation of independence in 1844 to the present. It examines, among others, the internal struggles between reformers-liberals and conservatives for political power around the independence-colonialism dilemma and the social classes and/or groups associated with them; the post-abolition social dynamics of race and class within the new nation; the efforts to construct a Dominican democracy and how they reflected in constitutional changes; the growing interactions of of the Dominican Republic with the United States as the predominant power in the continent and how it has affected Dominican politics, economy and population. Informed classroom discussions of reading assignments, oral presentation of summary of final research project, and final research paper.
3
This course examines the migration process of Dominicans to the U.S. and their transformation from migrants to settled, rooted people.
3
This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of the Americas. Whether defined by geography, culture, language, ethnicity, history, politics, or literature, the Americas have been a contested space for hundreds of years. We will examine some of the ways in which the Americas have been constructed, defined, and redefined since the time of Columbus (and before). We will pay particular attention to the ways in which the Americas served as both a terminus and a turning point for what is generally know as 'the western tradition'; in other words, we will examine the residues of the old world in the new world, as well as the importation of the new world into the old. Touching upon some of the topics that have come to define the history of the Americas, we will discuss the science(s) of exploration; the imaginaries of the new world and the old; the politics and economics of empire and colonialism; the cruelties of invasion, conquest, and slavery; the transformations of ecology and biology; the contours of nationalism and transnationalism; as well as the more recent phenomenon of globalization. As a foundational course in the study of the Americas, this course highlights some of the more important topics in the history of the Americas, but it also offers a serious introduction to interdisciplinary learning at the masters-level. Requirements include seminar participation, scholarly response papers, and the execution of an extended research assignment.
The course's focus is to explore the process of interdisciplinary, comparative research. More specifically, the class will introduce students to the field of "New American Studies" and teach them how scholars working in an interdisciplinary and transnational context think, argue, research, and write. First, students will trace the changing definition of American Studies: Originating as a field of study with a focus primarily on the United States, the field has expanded to encompass research spanning all of the Americas, which include the disparate and often marginalized cultural zones within. Second, they will study the field's relationship to twentieth-century social movements and related theoretical models and contemporary approaches to research, including Marxist theory, cultural studies, feminist theory, disciplines. In the final assignment, students will implement the research methodologies discussed over the course of the semester: They will choose a topic, develop a research agenda, conduct interdisciplinary research, and write a final research proposal, with an annotated bibliography.
3 hr./wk.
This course intends to answer the question: "What are the Americas today?" Addressing that question, the course takes an interdisciplinary approach in the study of the divergent postcolonial experiences in the Americas. This approach will include an analysis of decolonization, economical "imperialism" as well as the emergence of current transnational and racial identities and values. The study of cultural changes as a result of migrations, hybridizations and techno-economical dependency is a main focus in this course. Being by definition part of an inclusive program, this course contrasts the experiences of Native, French, Anglo, Spanish, and Lusophone speaking populations in the Americas. Students will layout the historical antecedents for the techno-economical dependency that has marked the transnational relations in the Americas. Students will discuss in a short paper (5 pages) the issue of cultural colonialism and its consequences in the uneven or failed development in some regions of the Americas. Based on the study of political and economical migrations, the students will create their own assessment of transnational and racial identities in the Americas. Based on the previous work and their bibliographical research, students will write a final paper developing a proposal for a socio-cultural definition of the Americas today.
3 hr./wk.
This course serves as an introduction to the geopolitics, that is the spatial expressions of power, that have shaped the geographic boundaries, cultural and racial representations and political and economic relations among the nations of the Americas. David Slater, writes in Geopolitics and the Post-colonial States: "It can be argued that US imperialism has always followed a double movement of erecting and policing boundaries, and of breaking down borders both internally and externally so as to open up new spaces of unfettered expansion" (30). We will examine the construction of US hegemony in the Americas, exploring continuities and critical conjunctures that have shaped relations among the nations of the Americas; we will also examine specific countries more closely through the close reading of primary and secondary sources. As a class, we will also attempt to extend the idea of geopolitics as it relates to protest, resistance and the structuring of people's everyday life.
3 hr./wk.
Both Henry James and James Baldwin were known for claiming that it was only through the experience of becoming estranged American ex-patriots traveling in Europe that they finally found their "American-ness." Likewise, many authors grouped within the so-called literature of the British West Indies had to leave home and migrate to Canada, the United States, and/or England to discover what it was to be "Jamaican, Guyanese, Trinidadian." Fleeing in some cases a colonial past and in others a questionable "post" colonial present, their transplantation problematizes what it means to be 'Caribbean.' At times tinged with "magical realism, at others only starkly realist, the art drawn from these writers' encounters with the past enchants, mystifies, at times, enrages, but always deals with what it means to constantly negotiate otherness. This graduate-level seminar will introduce students to the literature of 'British' 'West Indies' and its prevalent themes: colonial and post-colonial subjectivity"; exile and return; the interweaving of gender, race and class issues in their socio-cultural context; the notion of carnival; ethnicity and language; and otherness and hybridity, to name several.
3 hr./wk.
This course takes up a comparative approach rooted in the anthropology of race and gender. Students will build a theoretical framework from grounded studies of people's everyday lives in particular historical and cultural contexts across the Americas. We will engage with topics ranging from the role of science in perpetuating and then dismantling inequalities predicated on race, the forced sterilization of women of color, to relationships of power emergent in increasingly diasporic lives. While the course focuses on ethnographic readings, students will be able to develop an interdisciplinary perspective for analyzing, race, gender, and sexuality. We cannot do it "all" in this class and so you should take this as an opportunity to push yourselves to engage with a field that crosses Black studies, ethnic studies, gender studies.
3 hr./wk.
This graduate course explores the rise and fall of African slavery in the Americas from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Through readings discussions and films/documentaries, we shall analyze how slavery became the predominant mode of production in the Americas until the late 19th century. This course surveys the history, cultures and political economy of the Atlantic slave trade and its ongoing legacies in the Americas. In many ways, the themes of the course mirror the development of research interests and sensibilities concerning the defining of modernity and the emergence of new world transformations of European and African identities and transnationalisms. While we will concentrate on the Americas, there is little doubt that this forced migration was one element in an intertwined set of global exchanges and trade circuits. The consequences of extending new forms of labor, technology and capital alongside colonial exploration and expansion were germane in the development of ideologies of race and nationality on three continents. In this sense the Atlantic system conjoins multiple social practices, languages, and religions into new narratives of globalized identities. One of the goals of this course is to explore African Diasporic cultural expression and slave resistance in all of its manifestations. Another important objective of this course is to read and reflect upon the historical underpinnings of race relations and the legacies of racism across the Americas and internationally.
3 hr./wk.
This course reviews the Latin American Literary production from the late 18th to the last decade of the 20th century. The program follows the developments of two literary genres: verse (poetry) and narrative (short stories) along with some short novels. It begins with an overview of Latin American history and its literary productions. The connections between literature and power will be underlined and questioned from a cultural materialist approach. Later, the students will analyze poems written in the heart of the avant-garde movements and short stories of the so-called Boom. Brazilian writers are included and their production contrasted with that of Spanish-speaking America, both historically and aesthetically.
This course offers an ethnographic perspective on the ongoing movement of bodies, technologies, and commodities throughout the Americas in the 21st Century. Over the last two decades, anthropologists have offered a series of theoretical and ethnographic interventions on what was originally characterized as transnational processes. Students will examine various frameworks for understanding what is emerging as a "post/911" model for understanding the regimes of power, formal and informal, that organize border crossings as "transborder," "extraterritorial," transnational, global, and so on, in what can be broadly defined as a political and economic context of neoliberalism. In doing so, we will interrogate the place of the nation-state, and the ways in which territorial, ethnic, racial, gendered, postcolonial borders are crossed or not. While clearly U.S. hegemony is at the core of this discussion, significant attention will be placed on decentering the U.S. as the axis of interpretation. Through ethnographic case studies, students will be introduced to topics such as the links between structural, gendered, and everyday violence, the politics of clandestinity, to questions on the privileging of mobility as a problematic trope of the 21st Century.
3 hr./wk.
This graduate-level seminar focuses on the migration and immigration of people across the Americas during the 20th century. We begin the course by reading critical theory on the topic, from anthropology to economics, to the law. Then we explore the literature of migration and immigration, to and from the Americas, from the dawn of the twentieth century to the present. We first will investigate subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in the law and language of migration at the turn of the twentieth century, as the customary influx of northern European migration to the Americas mitigates and is complemented by waves of southern Europeans, eastern European Jews and Puerto Ricans moving west and north. Next, we study the mid-century, particularly the continued immigration and emigration of Puerto Ricans and Cubans. Finally, we look at population movement through the Americas late in the century, with special attention paid to Mexican, Caribbean and South American migration and immigration, and an unusual look at indigenous 'migration.'
3 hr./wk.
Privatization, devolution, and decentralization in many ways define neoliberal governance; these processes of shifting government services and political participation to the local level have redefined the role of the public sector not only in the US but internationally. We will raise questions about the public values we associate with the provision of government services as well as how the notion of "citizenship" changes as it becomes reframed within a "consumer-citizen" model. We will ask how the increasing emphasis on efficient and competitive "market-driven governance" has structured economic as well as political access and exclusion. The course readings will cover the following themes: encountering development; neoliberalism and the Washington consensus; governance, privatization, decentralization, and devolution; neoliberalising citizenship, consumer citizens; defining and decentering neoliberal urbanism; selling cities, culture, leisure and the production of urban space; fractured cities, fortress cities.
3 hr./wk.
Music in the Americas will present a survey of selected styles of Latin America music including the classical and popular traditions and considering its native, African, and European heritage. Each session will be dedicated to discussing genres and styles (cumbia, tango, bolero, samba, corrido, Latin jazz etc.) through guided listening of relevant recordings, pertinent readings, and screening of videotapes. In addition, the course will present the relevant theoretical issues pertinent to those musical styles including perspectives that shed light on ethnic identities, gender issues, migration, and diaspora questions. Weekly assignments will include listening and readings. A term paper and a class presentation will also be required.
3 hr./wk.
This course explores the global phenomenon of "gating" and privatizing urban spaces to create residential and commercial areas that offer a sense of heightened security and seclusion, a respite from the perceived chaos, violence and anonymity of the ever encroaching city. Gated communities are no longer to be found in the suburbs but are fracturing city space as fortified enclaves become sanitized, re-imagined, branded and sold. In this course we will explore the contours and content of this physical gating of urban metropolitan spaces through divergent lenses, taking an interdisciplinary journey into some of the "cities of walls" that have been emerging in the Americas. We will read ethnographic and sociological studies and urban theory as well as literary works that examine how the privatization of the city is redefining urban life in the Americas -from Buenos Aires and Sao Paolo to Los Angeles and New York. What does this (re)segregation by class, race, ethnicity and gender imply in terms of our day-to day encounters and relationships as well as our roles as citizens? Are we just gating our lives or our minds as well? We will cover some of the theoretical debates on gated communities, thinking about the reasons behind gating and the typologies associated with these different motivations, assessing the impact on the urban fabric as well as investigating the implication the increasing privatization of neighborhood and commercial spaces has in term social segregation and exclusion. We will also explore the historical continuities of gating, looking at the private practices and legal mechanisms by which communities have cordoned themselves off from others in the name of security, property values and ""life style"" choices to create segregated urban landscapes. We will be examining the formation of ""American Apartheid"" in the US, scrutinize the "the City of Walls" of Sao Paolo and "excavate the "fortress cities" of Los Angeles and New York. We will also read several novels, such as T.C. Boyle's Tortilla Curtains set in the California, The Thursday Wives by Claudia Piñeiro set in Argentina and The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
3 hr./wk.
Labor movements across the Americas are revising strategies, deepening cooperation across borders and drawing inspiration from each other's struggles in difficult times for workers everywhere. While closer economic integration across the hemisphere may call for more internationalist union perspectives, it remains the case that labor politics is focused on the nation state, and the relations between unions and their allies in social movements and community organizations are most rooted at the local level. 'Neoliberalism' - free-market, bro-business policies enforced through the IMF, the World Bank and written into free trade agreements - presents a common challenge to labor. And yet labor's response to neoliberalism has been uneven between Latin-, Anglo- and Franco-American nations. Asymmetries in power and wealth between the North and South remain highly relevant to attempts at closer, more effective labor cooperation. The course is a survey of emergent labor strategies across the hemisphere, encompassing labor organizing, collective bargaining and political strategies. We will take a multi-scale approach, examining how strategies play out at the local, national and regional scales. The class will cover major debates, including the rise of new forms of worker representation, labor migration, labor-party and labor-state relations, free trade and alternative regional integration projects, and how to confront the power of multinational corporations. Case studies will include: coordinated cross-border bargaining and organizing in the steel and auto industries; comparative anti-privatization and anti-austerity strategies in the public sector; the relationship between labor and labor-backed parties in power in Southern Cone and Andean nations; North American labor's response to NAFTA and mobilization against the defeated Free Trade Agreement of the Americas; labor's 'green jobs' agenda and perspectives on climate change and ecological crises; organizing immigrant workers and migrant workers' rights in the US and Canada; the labor rights/trade agreement nexus. The class will be taught in seminar format and rely on extensive student participation.
3 hr./wk.
Students register for three-thesis credits once they have selected a Thesis Advisor and Second Reader, and their thesis topic has been approved by the M.A. Committee.
3 hr./wk.
The capstone course requires students to apply what they have learned in other classes and to engage their research interests in a seminar setting. Course is taken toward the middle or end of the student’s program. Required for students not writing a thesis. Topic varies; past topics have included “Weimar in the Americas,” “Poverty,” “Cinema and Slavery,” “20th Century Revolutions in the Americas,” and ‘Dictatorship in the Americas’. Repeatable for credit once, with MA Director approval.
3 hr./wk.