Introduction to American Culture Studies

As an intellectual project rather than a fixed, static academic field, American Studies has been at the forefront of advancing theories, methods, and orientations that nuance analyses of global political economy, racial capitalism, uneven power dynamics, differential unfreedoms, the politics of culture, social movements, as well as academic and activist organizing toward social justice. Accordingly, rather than providing a prescriptive map that charts a coherent sense of what American Studies is, this course introduces us to some of its key discussions and debates to consider the ways in which this interdisciplinary formation might enrich, complicate, and re-orientate the conventional assumptions, practices, and values of our respective disciplinary homes. The wide range of multi-disciplinary Americanist scholarship considered throughout the semester will thus elucidate alternative orientations, theories, and methods that work to disrupt and reimagine the intimate relationship between knowledge production and violent projects of settler colonialism, incarceration, empire, war, and militarization. Collectively, the readings compel us to foreground the centrality of difference, power, and non-normativity underwriting the histories, cultures, socialities, and politics of "America."
Course Attributes:

Introduction to American Culture Studies

POLITICAL SCIENCE 645

Section 01