Same as Flm&Mda 130. "Film and Racial Conflict" examines how U.S cinema, as an institution within a matrix of other institutions (i.e. families, schools, churches, prisons), positions Whites, Indians, and Blacks. To this end, we will be concerned primarily with the institutional and ideological positionality (how and where subjects are placed by discourse, i.e. film) of the three above races this country has produced through settlerism, genocide, and slavery; and concerned, secondarily, with the culturally affirming, and often identity aggrandizing, "voices" of our three focus groups. Settlerism, genocide, and slavery are the three structural necessities which underwrite U.S. society. Our guiding question is this: In what ways do the formal and narrative properties of 20th and 21st century fiction film disavow and/or acknowledge these structural necessities? Put another way, we will explore how late 20th and early 21st century cinema is suggestive of America’s foundational, triangulated, and unresolved antagonisms: The White demand for mastery and expansion; the Red demand for return of the both the land and a genocided population; and the Black demand for repair and return of, literally, everything (subjectivity in the present and the memory of subjectivity from the past). A basic assumption of course is that the fiction film, even a love story, stands in relation to these unresolved antagonisms; and furthermore, the narrative (the script) of most films tries not to reflect upon this relation.
Days: TH  09:00-11:50 AM

Some feminist critics have raised serious concerns with the writings of Frantz Fanon primarily on charges of ill-consideration of the impacts of nationalism on the lives and survival of women. Indeed, the question of nationalism and its links to misogyny and control over female reproduction has been also raised. Other feminist critics namely Third World and Black feminist critics have insisted on holding on to Fanon in part because his attention to culture, neo-colonialism, spirituality, detention and incarceration, and violence create greater visibility for the role of women as political actors, political agents, and revolutionaries. The Fanon that has been touted, rejected, reproduced, and engaged by feminists of all stripes is a complicated voice among many in the black protest tradition. This course will examine several key works by Frantz Fanon and his reception and deployment by radical black feminism, Arab-American feminism, Algerian feminism, African feminisms, African Gender Studies, and Third World feminism.
Days:   12:00-12:00 AM

Same as Crm/Law C100. This course provides an historical survey of the role of race in the American legal system from colonial times to the present. We will examine the multiple, and often contradictory ways, judicial courts have defined the race and ethnicity of individuals and what those constructions tell us about racial and ethnic identity in America. The class will investigate controversial topics such as reparations, affirmative action, hate speech, and the role of race and the media in prominent cases such as O.J. Simpson and Trayvon Martin.
Days: M  06:00-08:50 PM

Cancelled.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

The class offers a look at multiculturalism as “contact zone” through the examples of cultural production of various minority groups in the United States and Germany. We will discuss literary, autobiographical, and theoretical writings, films and popular music in order to explore both the historical and contemporary conditions of two different multicultural societies in a global context (such as their histories of nation building and migration, notions of citizenship, discourses of race and ethnicity etc). Materials will include essays by Marie Louise Pratt, Angela Davis and R. Radhakrishnan, literary writings by Gish Jen, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Honigman as well as movies on the tensions between East and West German cultures (such as Good-Bye Lenin, dir. Wolfgang Becker) and on German Turkish life (Head-on, dir. Fatih Akin) and German and US hip hop,

Requirements: regular attendance, midterm and final, short writing assignments (short essay or blog). A website will be available at the beginning of the quarter.
Days: MO WE  04:00-05:20 PM

Just about everything we know about animals has been changing rapidly. For example, studies have shown that they have language, often complex ways of communicating, tremendous range of intelligence, unmistakable emotions, the ability to feel compassion, complex social networks, and so the discoveries stretch into the onrushing future. Despite these advances, human societies throughout the world treat animals simply as things to serve, benefit, be used and consumed by humans. The unyielding contradiction of ever-emphatically differentiating humans from other animals—that troubling unwillingness to let reality inform and to alter our imperative to use and profit from such use of animals which I express by the term humanimal –will be the subject of this course. With Japan from past to present as our ‘case study,’ we will explore human-other animal encounters through a wide variety of materials including literature, film, manga, and other forms of Japanese culture.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

E 101W fulfills the upper division-writing requirement for English majors and introduces them to a particular critical or theoretical approach to literature with practical application. In this section we will explore the intersections between law and literature. There will be three units: (1) The law's impact on literature; for our course, questions of censorship. We will read selections from Plato's Republic, Milton's "Areopagitica," Mill's On Liberty, and a few relevant Supreme Court cases. (2) Literary/rhetorical analysis of legal documents. We will read the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which ruled that it was constitutional for states to require a "separate but equal" system of racial segregation. Plessy was the law of the land until Brown v. Board of Education (1954). 3) Literary representations of the law. We will read Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel about segregation. Students will write three essays. Because this is a writing course, we will spend considerable time on writing both in and out of class. This section counts as a course for the Humanities and Law Minor. Nonetheless, it is a literature course, and students do not need to have any legal background. The goal of the course is to show how the skills we learn as English majors can help us better understand the law and how an understanding of certain legal issues can help us better understand some works of literature.
Days: MO WE  12:00-12:50 PM

"Film and Racial Conflict" examines how U.S cinema, as an institution within a matrix of other institutions (i.e. families, schools, churches, prisons), positions Whites, Indians, and Blacks. To this end, we will be concerned primarily with the institutional and ideological positionality (how and where subjects are placed by discourse, i.e. film) of the three above races this country has produced through settlerism, genocide, and slavery; and concerned, secondarily, with the culturally affirming, and often identity aggrandizing, "voices" of our three focus groups. Settlerism, genocide, and slavery are the three structural necessities which underwrite U.S. society. Our guiding question is this: In what ways do the formal and narrative properties of 20th and 21st century fiction film disavow and/or acknowledge these structural necessities? Put another way, we will explore how late 20th and early 21st century cinema is suggestive of America’s foundational, triangulated, and unresolved antagonisms: The White demand for mastery and expansion; the Red demand for return of the both the land and a genocided population; and the Black demand for repair and return of, literally, everything (subjectivity in the present and the memory of subjectivity from the past). A basic assumption of course is that the fiction film, even a love story, stands in relation to these unresolved antagonisms; and furthermore, the narrative (the script) of most films tries not to reflect upon this relation.
Days: TH  09:00-11:50 AM

This class introduces students to the prevalent debates surrounding the development and demise of African chattel slavery in what becomes the United States. How was African chattel slavery similar to or different from the experiences of European indentured servants and indigenous Americans prior to 1800? What do historians consider to be the key reasons explaining the United State’s persistent reliance on African labor up to the Civil War? How does the persistence of slavery impact American
historical memory? Students will answer these questions while learning how historians do what they do: that is research, interpret and analyze historical evidence. This class is geared towards history majors.
Days: WE  01:00-03:50 PM

Hitler and the Germans: Society and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945
In the 1920s, Germany was celebrated throughout Europe and North America as a model of democratic political reform, artistic experimentation, economic prosperity, and cultural diversity. The Germany of the Imperial period (1870/71-1918) had collapsed in the First World War. The authoritarian Empire (Kaiserreich) was replaced by the democratic Weimar Republic, named for the town in eastern Germany where a new German constitution was drafted in 1919. Yet by the late 1920s, millions of Germans gave their political support, their time, their money, and their allegiance to a political movement that called for the destruction of democracy, an attack on Jews, Communists, gay men, and lesbians, and deemed "asocial" anyone who was did not conform to narrowly prescribed social, political, and sexual standards. This course will explore Germany's rocky transition from authoritarian Kaiserreich to authoritarian Third Reich through the way station of the democratic Republic of Weimar. It will examine the promise and excitement, the sense of possibility and openness of the 1920s, and the utopian vision of a "racial state" that succeeded it in the 1920s. We will look in detail at the structure of the Nazi state; culture wars in the 1920s and 1930s; the significance of Hitler for the Third Reich; the march toward World War; and the "war against the Jews"--the Holocaust.
Days: MO WE  12:00-12:50 PM

In the mid-1700s, many thinkers of the European Enlightenment like the French philosopher Voltaire saw the Jews as backward and steeped in religious superstition. Just over a century later, the Jews were seen as pioneers of modernity in places as far apart as Berlin in Germany or Casablanca in Morocco. To study the history of the Jews in the modern world is to study the history of modern Western culture, but to do so from the margins. This course will explore how Jews encountered modernity, how they resisted and how they participated in shaping it, how modern culture transformed their identity and how they themselves helped transform modern culture. Topics discussed in this course range from the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the struggle for the political emancipation of the Jews to the twin challenge of assimilation and antisemitism; from religious reform to religious Orthodoxy; from the beginnings of modern Jewish politics to the rise of Zionism; from the experience of the Jews in Eastern Europe to that of their descendents in the United States; from the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust to the unlikely revival of Jewish life in the post-war era, particularly in the newly established state of Israel. We will work with primary sources and students will have the opportunity to develop their analytical and writing skills through a series of short writing assignments throughout the quarter. There will also be a final exam.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

History 142B/Political Science 129D: The 2012 Election in Historical Perspective

This course will consider the issues, candidates, and trends in the 2012 presidential election in the context of American history: topics include the expansion of voting rights, the formation of the New Deal coalition and the Reagan "revolution," past political strategies, and the role of money, the media, and the courts in elections since WWII.

Two lectures per week; midterm, final exams.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

Recovering Stories of Struggle: Research on Life Histories of Apartheid-era South Africa

Prominent anti-Apartheid activists have captured the world’s attention since the 1950s. The experiences of leaders like Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu tell an important part of South Africa’s history in the twentieth century, but not all of it. The interplay of race, ethnic identity, gender, and social class greatly complicated the lived reality of Apartheid and shaped the range of resistance to it. This class will explore the causes and diverse consequences of Apartheid through careful attention to the life stories of many individuals, including political leaders, prominent activists and artists, and ordinary people.

Students will develop research skills by focusing on sources and strategies that reveal the lived experience of a period of major historical change. Readings and films will provide evidence of the many ways people resisted Apartheid’s restrictions. We will access the lived experience of individuals through several genres: biography, autobiography, life-history, and memoir recounted in text and film. Students will have the opportunity to compare such finished narratives with primary source materials: court transcripts, news accounts, and images from the period.

Critical Questions
What role do individuals play in shaping broad historical processes? Do individual actions influence events, or do events provide the parameters for individual lives? Does your answer to this question change if you consider the biographies of prominent people compared to ordinary people?
What are the strengths and limitations of presenting large-scale historical processes (such as racism, women’s rights, state formation and governance, global capital circulation, or multi-national diplomatic negotiations) through the lens of individual lives?
What features differentiate biography, autobiography, life history and memoir? What kinds of stories is each genre best at telling? What perspectives can each genre tend to obscure?
How did aspects of individual identity—particularly race, class, and gender—shape an individual’s experience? What differences emerge in the telling of famous people’s life stories compared to “ordinary people”? How did the stories of “ordinary people” come to light?
Days:   12:00-12:00 AM

"Assholes, Outlaws, and Psychopaths"

This course examines three different types of moral personality--assholes, outlaws, and psychopaths--in light of the different ways they pose fundamental questions about human nature, social cooperation, fairness, punishment, and blame.
Days: TH  04:00-06:50 PM

We think of the political domain and our democratic tradition in terms of the pursuit of happiness, enabled and supported by institutions the citizens determine to do just that: allow us to pursue our individual lives as we see fit. Our course will turn to philosophical voices that think of the political in different terms. Hannah Arendt’s ‘political’ is the activity that collectively realizes joint ways of life. She emphasizes shared values and shared forms of life. Carl Schmitt conceives of the political field as encounter of antagonistic agents. He emphasizes power and conflict. The two theories will lead to very different perspectives on national and international politics. We will try to determine the merits and problems of these two approaches.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

Do individuals have natural rights? What would life be like if there were no government? What is the moral basis for our obligation to obey the state? What is the nature of law? Under what circumstances, if any, is resistance to government justified? We shall study these issues and answers to them in the writings of the three great social contract theorists: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
Days: TU TH  10:30-11:50 AM

When do two or more people count as doing something together? What is a social convention? What are we talking about when we speak of the beliefs of groups? What about the emotions---we talk about groups feeling remorse, for instance. Does this make sense? Such questions concern the nature of central social phenomena in the human world. While including some historical sources, this course will focus on the issues and contemporary philosophical debates in this area.
Days: WE  02:30-05:20 PM

This course examines ideologies of nationalisms, nation-states, and statehood, and their unique relations to gender, sexuality, class, and race. Assigned readings will include several classic texts on nationalism, as well as their feminist, queer and postcolonial critiques. Specific topics addressed may include: the definition of state and nation, the relationship of gender and sexuality to nationalist movements, the spread of this model of identity and territoriality through colonial expansion, nationalism and notions of family and domesticity, women’s participation in various nation- and state-building projects and anti-colonial struggles, and the interrelation of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity in national identity constructions.
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM

The class offers a look at multiculturalism as “contact zone” through the examples of cultural production of various minority groups in the United States and Germany. We will discuss literary, autobiographical, and theoretical writings, films and popular music in order to explore both the historical and contemporary conditions of two different multicultural societies in a global context (such as their histories of nation building and migration, notions of citizenship, discourses of race and ethnicity etc). Materials will include essays by Marie Louise Pratt, Angela Davis and R. Radhakrishnan, literary writings by Gish Jen, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Honigman as well as movies on the tensions between East and West German cultures (such as Good-Bye Lenin, dir. Wolfgang Becker) and on German Turkish life (Head-on, dir. Fatih Akin) and German and US hip hop,

Requirements: regular attendance, midterm and final, short writing assignments (short essay or blog). A website will be available at the beginning of the quarter.
Days: M W  04:00-05:20 PM