CSER Undergraduate Course Offerings – Spring 2021
CSER UN3490 Sec 001
POST 9/11 IMMIGRATION POLICIES
Prof. Elizabeth OuYang—R 10:10am –12:00pm
Since September 11, 2001, there has been an avalanche of immigration enforcement policies and initiatives proposed or implemented under the guise of national security. This course will analyze the domino effect of the Patriot Act, the Absconder Initiative, Special Registration, the Real I.D. Act, border security including the building of the 700 mile fence along the U.S./Mexico border, Secured Communities Act-that requires the cooperation of state and local authorities in immigration enforcement, the challenge to birthright citizenship, and now the congressional hearings on Islamic radicalization. Have these policies been effective in combating the war on terrorism and promoting national security? How have states joined the federal bandwagon of immigration enforcement or created solutions to an inflexible, broken immigration system?
CSER UN3919 MODES OF INQUIRY
Prof. Sayantani Dasgupta—R 10:10pm – 12:00pm
*Major Requirement
Must register for Lab Session Mondays 2:10-3:10pm. This class, a combination of a seminar and a workshop, will prepare students to conduct, write up and present original research. It has several aims and goals. First, the course introduces students to a variety of ways of thinking about knowledge as well as to specific ways of knowing and making arguments key to humanistic and social science fields. Second, this seminar asks students to think critically about the approaches they employ in pursuing their research. The course will culminate in a semester project, not a fully executed research project, but rather an 8-10 page proposal for research that will articulate a question, provide basic background on the context that this question is situated in, sketch preliminary directions and plot out a detailed methodological plan for answering this question. Students will be strongly encouraged to think of this proposal as related to their thesis or senior project. Over the course of the semester, students will also produce several short exercises to experiment with research techniques and genres of writing.
CSER UN3922
RACE & REPRESENTATION IN ASIAN AMERICAN CINEMA
Prof. Eric Gamalinda—R 4:10pm – 6:00pm
This seminar focuses on the critical analysis of Asian representation and participation in Hollywood by taking a look at how mainstream American cinema continues to essentialize the Asian and how Asian American filmmakers have responded to Orientalist stereotypes. We will analyze various issues confronting Asian American communities, including “yellowface”; white patriarchy; male and female stereotypes; the “model minority” myth; “Chinatowns” as spectacle; panethnicity; the changing political interpretations of the term “Asian American” throughout American history; gender and sexuality; and cultural hegemonies and privileging within the Asian community. Feature films and documentaries will be supplemented by a substantial amount of literature to provide a solid grounding on race theory and help students examine Asian [mis] representation in mainstream media; we will then view some examples of contemporary Asian American films and discuss how they challenge culturally embedded stereotypes.
CSER UN3926
LATIN MUSIC AND IDENTITY
Prof. Edward Morales — T 2:10pm-4:00pm
Latin music has had a historically strained relationship with mainstream music tastes, exploding in occasional boom periods, and receding into invisibility in others. What if this were true because it is a space for hybrid construction of identity that directly reflects a mixture of traditions across racial lines in Latin America? This course will investigate Latin musics transgression of binary views of race in Anglo-American society, even as it directly affects the development of pop music in America. From New Orleans jazz to Texas corridos, salsa, rock, and reggaeton, Latin music acts as both as a soundtrack and a structural blueprint for the 21st centurys multicultural experiment. There will be a strong focus on studying Latin musics political economy, and investigating the story it tells about migration and globalization.
CSER UN3928 SEC 001
COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION
*Major Requirement
Prof. Mae Ngai —M 2:10pm – 4:00pm
Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructor’s permission. This course explores the centrality of colonialism in the making of the modern world, emphasizing cross-cultural and social contact, exchange, and relations of power; dynamics of conquest and resistance; and discourses of civilization, empire, freedom, nationalism, and human rights, from 1500 to 2000. Topics include pre-modern empires; European exploration, contact, and conquest in the new world; Atlantic-world slavery and emancipation; and European and Japanese colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
CSER UN3928 SEC 002
COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION
*Major Requirement
Prof. Claudio Lomnitz—W 10:10am – 12:00pm
Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructor’s permission. This course explores the centrality of colonialism in the making of the modern world, emphasizing cross-cultural and social contact, exchange, and relations of power; dynamics of conquest and resistance; and discourses of civilization, empire, freedom, nationalism, and human rights, from 1500 to 2000. Topics include pre-modern empires; European exploration, contact, and conquest in the new world; Atlantic-world slavery and emancipation; and European and Japanese colonialism in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
CSER UN3942 SEC 001
RACE AND RACISMS
Prof. Catherine Fennell —TBD
In this class we will approach race and racism from a variety of disciplinary and intellectual perspectives, including: critical race theory/philosophy, anthropology, history and history of science and medicine. We will focus on the development and deployment of the race concept since the mid-19th century. Students will come to understand the many ways in which race has been conceptualized, substantiated, classified, managed and observed in the (social) sciences, medicine, and public health. We will also explore the practices and effects of race (and race-making) in familiar and less familiar social and political worlds. In addition to the courses intellectual content, students will gain critical practice in the seminar format — that is, a collegial, discussion-driven exchange of ideas.
CSER UN3964
MAYA GUATEMALA – NEOLIBERALISM & RESISTANCE
Prof. Czarina Thelen —W 10:10 – 12:00pm
Guatemala’s recurrent history of Indigenous genocide is closely linked to U.S. interventions. Meanwhile, Maya organizing in Guatemala has helped spearhead Indigenous political visibility globally. This course examines socio-historical dynamics that have shaped Indigenous Guatemala to better understand current crises like migration and postwar violence. We study settler colonialism; Maya land dispossession and labor exploitation; U.S. corporate imperialism via banana republics; Maya autonomy efforts; Maya intellectuals, populist organizing, and the guerrilla revolutionary movement; racism and postwar multiculturalism; genocidal military counterinsurgency; sexual violence and femicide; the social impacts of Guatemalan and U.S. Catholicism and Evangelicalism; postwar neoliberal restructuring; and the rise of the narco-state and resource extraction on Indigenous territories. We will look at contemporary postwar issues of political disillusionment, militarized “war by other means,” conflicts between Indigenous communities and environmental conservationists, gender and the recovery of Indigenous law and anti-GMO organizing involving Native seed banks. We pay special attention to Indigenous political action as resistance to highly oppressive regimes of terror.
CSER UN4360
AMERICAN DIVA: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE
Prof. Deborah Paredez—T 10:10am – 12:00pm
What makes a diva a diva? How have divas shaped and challenged our ideas about American culture, performance, race, space and capital during the last century? This seminar explored the central role of the diva—the celebrated, iconic, and supremely skilled female performer—in the fashioning and re-imagining of racial, gendered, sexual, national, temporal, and aesthetic categories of American culture.
Master’s Program
CSER GR5000
INTRO TO AMERICAN STUDIES
Prof. Matt Sandler—M 4:10pm – 6:00pm
This course explores the set of possibilities presented by American Studies as a comparative field of study. We begin with a brief overview of the history of the field, and then we’ll focus primarily on the range of modes in which its interdisciplinary work has been undertaken (literary, historical, legal, digital, etc.). The idea here is not to arrive a comprehensive picture of American Studies, but to think about the many ways people have produced knowledge under its aegis. We will also focus on work by Columbia faculty, and sessions of the course are built around visits by faculty in the field to Columbia’s University Seminar in American Studies. Our guiding questions include: How does one do research in a multimedia, “cultural” environment? How does one situate oneself as an “intellectual” or “critic” in relation to one’s object of study? How does one write about different media/genres? How does one incorporate different methodologies into one research project?
