First-Year Seminar (101-6-21)

Topic

Dwelling in Difference: Diversity and Multicultura

Instructors

Anna Zalokostas

Meeting Info

University Hall 018 English: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM

Overview of class

What is the role of diversity in U.S. society? How can it help to realize aims such as human flourishing, equality, or liberation? These questions generate very different answers, ranging from early ideas of the US as a melting pot, to the Black feminists of the Combahee River Collective who argued that none of us are free until all of us are free until all of us are free, to the novelist Karen Tei Yamashita who proclaimed in the 1990s that "cultural diversity is bullshit." This course examines how such writers historically envisioned diversity, multiplicity, and difference in 20th century America. Moving from ideas of assimilation and cross-racial solidarity in the early 20th century to recent understandings of intersectionality and multiculturalism, we will ask: What models have writers formulated to understand and describe difference? What do these accounts tell us about social transformations within the US? And, what are the utopian horizons—and daily contradictions—of living in a multiethnic, multiracial society? Possible readings include: Carlos Bulosan, Richard Wright, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones, John Cassavetes, the Combahee River Collective, June Jordan, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Ernesto Quiñonez

Class Attributes

WCAS First-Year Seminar

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Reserved for First Year & Sophomore only