First-Year Writing Seminar (101-8-20)

Topic

Race and Sex around the Globe

Instructors

Angad Singh

Meeting Info

University Hall 418: Mon, Wed 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

Killers of the Flower Moon, a front-runner for the 2024 Oscars, has a simple plot: white men use love as a ruse to marry Native American women, murder them, and take their land and property rights. Sex's violent relationship with race, which Scorsese's film so vividly depicts, has been a reality around our world for a long, long time. Here in the United States, this harmful dynamic is quite evident in the fact that marriage between individuals belonging to different races was banned by most states until 1967. In this class, we will use fiction and non-fiction to consider the relationship between sex and race in the United States, South Asia, and Europe. Focusing on the past century in our intellectual travels across the globe, we shall read novels including E. M. Forster's A Passage to India and essays like Amia Srinivasan's "The Right to Sex." Thinking about themes such as family, queerness, and friendship, we will spend the quarter learning about the attraction and devastation produced by the heady collision between race and sex.

Class Attributes

WCAS Writing Seminar

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Weinberg First Year Seminars are only available to first-year students.