This course offers an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of Ethnic Studies. Ethnic Studies centers the theories, histories, and perspectives of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American people in the United States, with particular attention to the study of comparative race and ethnic relations in the United States and its empire. We will explore key themes and concepts in Ethnic Studies such as imperialism and colonialism, social movements, migration, and intersectionality using analysis of popular culture, and historical and current events.

From the Zumba Fitness Program to Jane the Virgin, salsa night to the ubiquitous taco truck, “Latin” culture is popular. But what do we make of the popularity of “Latin” culture at a time when many Latina/o communities face larger systemic inequalities related to issues such as race, ethnicity, or immigration status? How do organizations and industries represent and market Latinidad to the US public, and how do these forms of popular culture and representation influence our perceptions of Latina/o life in the United States? How do Latina/o consumers view these representations? This course explores these questions through a critical examination of the representation and marketing of Latinidad, or Latina/o identities, in US popular culture. We will pay particular attention to the intersections between Latina/o identities, belonging, immigration, race, gender, and sexuality in the United States.

This course examines how that icon of modernity, New York City, has been depicted in literature and the arts, from its evolution into the nation’s cultural and financial capital in the nineteenth century to the present. We’ll consider how urban reformers, boosters, long-time residents, immigrants, tourists, newspaper reporters, journalists, poets, novelists, artists, and filmmakers have shaped new and often highly contested meanings of this dynamic and diverse city. We'll also consider how each vision of the city returns us to crucial questions of perspective, identity, and ownership, and helps us to understand the complexity of metropolitan experience. Authors may include Walt Whitman, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, and Colson Whitehead. We’ll look at the art of John Sloan, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Levitt, Berenice Abbott, Andre D. Wagner, and others. We’ll close the semester with films set in New York.

This course examines the experiences and cultures of Afro-Latinas/os, people of both African and Latin American descent, in the United States. We will consider how blackness intersects with Latina/o identity, using social movements, politics, popular culture, and literature as the bases of our analysis. This course addresses these questions transnationally, taking into account not only racial dynamics within the United States, but also the influence of dominant Latin American understandings of race and national identity. We will consider the social constructions of blackness and Latinidad; the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the Latina/o community; immigration and racial politics; representations of Afro-Latinas/os in film, music, and literature; and African American-Latino relations.

This course examines historical and contemporary contexts and processes of defining Asian/American beauty as well as the ways in which beauty is used to manage bodies, define social hierarchies, and gain or maintain power. Moreover, this course asks how presentations of beauty, especially “beautiful bodies,” could also be used as forms of subversion and resistance. Looking at sites such beauty pageants, cosmetic consumer cultures, drag performances, cosmetic surgery, and the transnational production and consumption of beauty influencers we will investigate how race, gender, sexuality, and class informs definitions of beauty and how definitions of beauty inform constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

This course examines literature that challenges the construction of borders, be they physical, ideological, or metaphoric. The theorizing of the border, as more than just a material construct used to demarcate national boundaries, has had a profound impact on the ways in which Chicana/Latinas have written about the issue of identity and subject formation. We will examine how the roles of women are constructed to benefit racial and gender hierarchies through the policing of borders and behaviors. In refusing to conform to gender roles or hegemonic ideas about race or sexuality, the Chicana and Latina writers being discussed in the course illustrate the necessity of crossing the constructed boundaries of identity being imposed by the community and the greater national culture.

An examination of conservative movements and ideas in terms of class, gender, and race. Historical survey and social analysis of such major conservative movements and ideas as paleoconservatism, neoconservatism, and compassionate conservatism. The emergence of conservative stances among women, minorities, and media figures. The conservative critique of American life and its shaping of contemporary national discourse on morality, politics, and culture.