English 49, Spring 1997
Peter Schmidt
"Whiteness" and Racial Difference**
MWF 10:30 - 11:20am, LPAC 201

A look at the conflicted ways in which "racial" identities and differences have been constructed in past and contemporary cultures, especially in the U.S. Topics given emphasis in the syllabus include why saying "race doesn't matter" is not enough; how a new debates about the history of race have changed American Studies and feminist studies; how European immigrants to the U.S. became "white" and with what benefits and what costs; how popular culture can both resist and perpetuate racist culture; and an introduction to issues of "passing," multi-racial identity, and recovering a multiracial past. The format of the class will include both lecture and student-led discussion.

**Note for English majors: This course can be counted as a "theory" course towards meeting the English Department's distribution requirements.

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SYLLABUS TOPICS AND READINGS
Introduction: Why Talk About 'Race' At All?
Why Not Just Be Friends and Celebrate Our Differences?

• Benjamin Demott, The Trouble With Friendship: Why Americans Can't Think Straight About Race Atlantic Monthly Press
• Adrian Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black" [xerox]
• movie: Six Degrees of Separation

Alternatives: Facing Race in History

• essays in the "Racial Ecology" section of Maria P.P. Root, Racially Mixed People in America: "Within, Between, and Beyond Race," Maria P.P. Root; "The Illogic of American Racial Categories," Paul R. Spickard
• Lisa Lowe, "Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique" and "Imagining Los Angeles in the Production of Multiculturalism," in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics
  
  movies:
• Blade Runner [Ridley Scott]
• History and Memory [Rea Tajiri]

Race and Recent Paradigm Changes in American Studies

• Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Interrogating 'Whiteness,' Complicating 'Blackness': Remapping American Culture" [xerox from American Quarterly]
• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Harvard/Random Hse
• Willa Cather, Sapphira and the Slave Girl; E.A. Poe, "Gordon Pym" [xerox]; Ernest Hemingway, "Indian Camp" [xerox]
• Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, chs. 2 and 5 (on American literature and cultural politics)
• movie: The Searchers [John Ford, John Wayne; 1956]

Always Think Historically: The Social Construction of 'Whiteness' in History

• Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, "Jews in the U.S.: The Rising Costs of Whiteness," in Names We Call Home [xerox]
• David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness Verso
• Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History Verso

Popular Culture and Race: Theorizing Complexity

• Darrell Y. Hamamoto, Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation Minnesota
• a Bonanza television episode, "The Fear Merchants" [if available]
• Orient Express [dir. Josef von Sternberg; w/ Marlene Dietrich]

on reserve:

• Gina Marchetti, Romance and the 'Yellow Peril'
• Tricia Rose, Black Noise Wesleyan [on hip hop aesthetics and politics]
• George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place and Time Passages Verso
• Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class Oxford

La Raza and the Melting Pot

• Carlos A. Fernández, "La Raza and the Melting Pot: A Comparative Look at Multiethnicity," in Root, Racially Mixed People
• Alejandro Lugo, "The Problem of Color in México and the U.S.-Mexican Border: A Critique of Mestizaje in the Contexts of Postcoloniality" [xerox]

movies:

• Touch of Evil [Orson Welles, 1959]
• My Family [1994; with Jimmy Smits]
• Lone Star [John Sayles, 1996]

on reserve:

• José David Saldívar, The Dialectics of our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History
• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
• __________, Making Face, Making Soul = Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color

'Passing'; Multiracial Identities; Recovering the Multiracial Past

• Adrian Piper, "Passing for White, Passing for Black" [xerox]
• Maria P.P. Root, ed., selected essays from Racially Mixed People in America
• Sarah Willie, "Playing the Devil's Advocate: Defending a Multiracial Identity in Fractured Community," in Names We Call Home [xerox]

General Reserve materials for the course will include:

• Naomi Zack, American Mixed Race Rowman and Littlefield
• Lise Funderberg, White, Black, Other
• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
• James McBride: The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to his White Mother
• F. James Davis, Who Is Black?: One Nation's Definition [on the U.S.]
• Prism Lives/Emerging Voices of Multiracial Asians (a bibliography from the UCLA Asian American Studies Center)
• Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg.
• American Race Traitor, Mab Segrest
• Racial Formations in the U.S.: From the 1960s to the 1980s, Michael Omi and Howard Winant
• there are also plentiful materials on race, history, and other matters available at the Intercultural Center
  

Student Research Paper topics and titles, May 1997

Saudia Amiruddin, "West Indian Immigrants: Multiple Definitions of Racial Identification"

Marialuz Castro, "Latino/Hispanic: Different Identities?"

Mark Charette, "Wearing the Mask." On whites' varying use of "ebonics" on the World Wide Web in the context of the U.S. history of racial masking (minstrelsy and other forms).

Ahyana Clark, "The Projection Theory of Racial Interaction and Classification." Immigrants acculturate themselves into American society by measuring themselves against the current social hierarchy. For the Irish, the achievement of "white" status came in the nineteenth-century by mocking the African American population. In a similar manner, more recent immigrant gorups place themselves along the racial classification specturm by comparing themselves to Anglos and African Americans. Discusses works by Chang-Rae Lee and David Mura, among others.

Carlos Colon, "Eye of the Tiger." An analysis of coverage of Tiger Woods in the mass media.

Will Dulaney, "A Critique of Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve"

Sarah Elwell, "Sister Souljah's No Disrespect"

Erin Figueira, "Africanist Identity in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula." Reads these novels via concepts from Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

Aarti Iyer, "Indian Americans as Asians: Testing Some of Lisa Lowe's Hypotheses in Immigrant Acts"

Raven Lipmanson, on Theresa Cha's DICTEE

Christina Lutz, "Pulp Friction: Racial Constructions in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction"

Lauren McBride, "On James McBride's The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother."

Ford O'Connell, "The Importance of Texas Border Towns: On John Sayles' Lone Star"

Jennifer Dana Weiss, "A Meditation on the Experience of the White American Reform Jew: Highlighting the Ambiguity of Racial and Cultural Categories in the U.S."