Ethnicity and Race Studies

CSER UN3701 LATINX RACIAL IDENTITY ＆ CULTURAL PRODUCTION. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 22.

The course will investigate the impact of racial identity among Latinx in the U.S. on cultural production of Latinos in literature, media, politics and film. The seminar will consider the impact of bilingualism, shifting racial identification, and the viability of monolithic terms like Latinx. We will see how the construction of Latinx racial identity affects acculturation in the U.S., with particular attention to hybrid identities and the centering of black and indigenous cultures. Examples will be drawn from different Latinx ethnicities from the Caribbean, Mexico and the rest of Latin America

CSER UN3875 Performances of Race ＆ Disaster. 4.00 points.

Through close study of popular culture and policy, this course examines the creation and maintenance of race within and through scenes of “natural disaster.” Flood, famine, and earthquake are demonstrations of unrest and rupture that are not simply environmental but also socio-politically produced by the ongoing disaster of racial capitalism. In our efforts to uncover the ways in which race is (per)formed on stage and street as well as within the wide halls of government, we will pay close attention to the language, services, organizations, and cultural productions used to entrench the punitive differences announced and amplified by disaster. Along the way, we will also complicate that word (“disaster”) in order to listen to the voices and make space for the bodies of those vulnerable peoples in the U.S. and contiguous Global South

CSER UN3905 ASIAN AMERICAN ＆ PSYCH OF RACE. 4.00 points.

This seminar provides an introduction to mental health issues for Asian Americans. In particular, it focuses on the psychology of Asian Americans as racial/ethnic minorities in the United States by exploring a number of key concepts: immigration, racialization, prejudice, family, identity, pathology, and loss. We will examine the development of identity in relation to self, family, college, and society. Quantitative investigation, qualitative research, psychology theories of multiculturalism, and Asian American literature will also be integrated into the course

CSER UN3913 VIDEO AS INQUIRY. 4.00 points.

The goal of this course is to familiarize students with visual production, particularly video production, as a mode of inquiry to explore questions related to race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and other forms of social hierarchy and difference. The class will include readings in visual production as a mode of inquiry and on the basic craft of video production in various genres (fiction, documentary, and experimental). As part of the course, students will produce a video short and complete it by semester's end

CSER UN3940 COMP STUDY OF CONSTITUTNL CHAL. 4.00 points.

This course will examine how the American legal system decided constitutional challenges affecting the empowerment of African, Latino, and Asian American communities from the 19th century to the present. Focus will be on the role that race, citizenship, capitalism/labor, property, and ownership played in the court decision in the context of the historical, social, and political conditions existing at the time. Topics include the denial of citizenship and naturalization to slaves and immigrants, government sanctioned segregation, the struggle for reparations for descendants of slavery, and Japanese Americans during World War II

CSER UN3942 RACE AND RACISMS. 4.00 points.

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 UN3990 SENIOR PROJECT SEMINAR. 4.00 points.

The Senior Project Seminar will focus primarily on developing students’ ideas for their research projects while charting their research goals. The course is designed to develop and hone the skills necessary to complete a senior thesis paper or creative project. An important component of the seminar is the completion of original and independent student research. The seminar provides students a forum in which to discuss their work with both the instructor and their peers. The professor, who facilitates the colloquium, will also provide students with additional academic support through seminar presentations, one-on-one meetings, and classroom exercises; supplementary to the feedback they receive from their individual faculty advisors. The course is divided into three main parts: 1.) researching and producing a senior project thesis; 2.) the submission of coursework throughout the spring semester that help lead to a successful completed project; 3.) and an oral presentation showcasing one’s research to those in and beyond the CSER community at the end of the academic year. This course is reserved for seniors who are completing a CSER senior project and who have successfully completed Modes of Inquiry in either their junior or senior year

CSER GU4004 Data, Race, Power and Justice. 4.00 points.

For more than a century, scientists, policy makers, law enforcement, and government agencies have collected, curated and analyzed data about people in order to make impactful decisions. This practice has exploded along with the computational power available to these agents. Those who design and deploy data collection, predictive analytics, and autonomous and intelligent decision-making systems claim that these technologies will remove problematic biases from consequential decisions. They aim to put a rational and objective foundation based on numbers and observations made by non-human sensors in the management of public life and to equip experts with insights that, they believe, will translate into better outcomes (health, economic, educational, judicial) for all. But these dreams and their pursuit through technology are as problematic as they are enticing. Throughout American history, data has often been used to oppress minoritized communities, manage populations, and institutionalize, rationalize, and naturalize systems of racial violence. The impersonality of data, the same quality that makes it useful, can silence voices and displace entire ways of knowing the world

CSER GU4005 Abolition: Theory and Practice. 4.00 points.

This course will follow the idea of abolition as expressed first through the eighteenthand nineteenth-century struggle to end chattel slavery in the Americas, and then as it has come to define the struggle against over-policing and mass-incarceration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the first half of the class, we will consider abolition in England and its colonies, Haiti, Cuba, and the U.S. In so doing we will examine both primary sources from abolitionist print culture (narratives by fugitives from slavery, speeches, poems, and polemical tracts), as well as secondary sources by historians, literary critics, and political theorists. In the second half, we will likewise read writing by activists (some incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, and some not) alongside journalism and scholarship from the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of carceral studies. Across both periods, Black writers will take up the bulk of our attention

CSER GU4340 Visionary Medicine: Racial Justice, Health and Speculative Fiction. 4.00 points.

In Fall 2014, medical students across the U.S. staged die-ins as part of the nationwide #blacklivesmatter protests. The intention was to create a shocking visual spectacle, laying on the line “white coats for black lives.” The images were all over social media: students of all colors, dressed in lab coats, lying prone against eerily clean tile floors, stethoscopes in pockets, hands and around necks. One prone student held a sign reading, “Racism is Real.” These medical students’ collective protests not only created visual spectacle, but produced a dynamic speculative fiction. What would it mean if instead of Michael Brown or Eric Garner or Freddie Gray, these other, more seemingly elite bodies were subjected to police violence? In another viral image, a group of African American male medical students from Harvard posed wearing hoodies beneath their white coats, making clear that the bodies of some future doctors could perhaps be more easily targeted for state-sanctioned brutality. “They tried to bury us,” read a sign held by one of the students, “they didn’t realize we were seeds.” Both medicine and racial justice are acts of speculation; their practices are inextricable from the practice of imagining. By imagining new cures, new discoveries and new futures for human beings in the face of illness, medicine is necessarily always committing acts of speculation. By imagining ourselves into a more racially just future, by simply imagining ourselves any sort of future in the face of racist erasure, social justice activists are similarly involved in creating speculative fictions. This course begins with the premise that racial justice is the bioethical imperative of our time. It will explore the space of science fiction as a methodology of imagining such just futures, embracing the work of Asian- and Afroturism, Cosmos Latinos and Indigenous Imaginaries. We will explore issues including Biocolonialism, Alien/nation, Transnational Labor and Reproduction, the Borderlands and Other Diasporic Spaces. This course will be seminar-style and will make central learner participation and presentation. The seminar will be inter-disciplinary, drawing from science and speculative fictions, cultural studies, gender studies, narrative medicine, disability studies, and bioethics. Ultimately, the course aims to connect the work of science and speculative fiction with on the ground action and organizing

CSER GU4350 CINEMA OF SUBVERSION. 4.00 points.

Russian filmmaker Andre Tarkovsky said that “the artist has no right to an idea in which he is not socially committed.” Argentine filmmaker Fernando Solanas and Spanish-born Octavio Getino postulated an alternative cinema that would spur spectators to political action. In this course we will ask the question: How do authoritarian governments influence the arts, and how do artists respond? We will study how socially committed filmmakers have subverted and redefined cinema aesthetics to challenge authoritarianism and repression. In addition, we will look at how some filmmakers respond to institutional oppression, such as poverty and corruption, even within so-called “free” societies. The focus is on contemporary filmmakers but will also include earlier classics of world cinema to provide historical perspective. The course will discuss these topics, among others: What is authoritarianism, what is totalitarianism, and what are the tools of repression within authoritarian/totalitarian societies? What is Third Cinema, and how does it represent and challenge authoritarianism? How does film navigate the opposition of censorship, propaganda and truth? How do filmmakers respond to repressive laws concerning gender and sexual orientation? How do they deal with violence and trauma? How are memories of repressive regimes reflected in the psyche of modern cinema? And finally, what do we learn about authority, artistic vision, and about ourselves when we watch these films?

CSER GR5001 METHODS IN AMERICAN STUDIES. 4.00 points.

Conceived in the 1920’s and 1930’s, American Studies sought to make a synoptic account of the “national character.” Since the 1960’s, the field has turned towards a focus on various forms of inequality as the dark side of American exceptionalism. This course surveys the development of the field’s current preoccupations, covering a range of periods, regions, groups, and cultural practices that present productive problems for generalizations about U.S. identity. We begin with the first academic movement in American Studies, the myth and symbol school—and think through its growth in the context of post-WWII funding for higher education. We then move on to a series of debates centered at intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. We’ll close by examining the historical background of protest movements built around the identitarian concerns about rape culture and mass incarceration

SOCI GR6068 Reckoning with Asian America. 4.00 points.

It took the mass murder of six Asian women in Atlanta on March 16, 2021 to draw national attention to what Asian Americans have been warning about since the wake of Covid-19: a surge in anti-Asian violence and hate. Since the onset of the coronavirus, 1 in 8 Asian American adults experienced a hate incident, and 1 in 7 Asian American women worry all the time about being victimized, reflecting an under-recognized legacy of anti-Asian violence, bigotry, misogyny, and discrimination in the United States that dates back more than 150 years. Drawing on research and readings from the social sciences, this course links the past to the present in order to understand this legacy, and how it continues to affect Asian Americans today

CLGR GR6822 Writing of Marginalized Communities in Germany. Politics, Aesthetics, Interventions. 4.00 points.

For the first time since the Second World War, the far right wins a regional election in Germany. All comes together with a rising number of Nazi attacks and pogroms, documented cases of police violence and racial profiling, political parties promoting the idea of a Fortress Europe, and more restrictions being imposed on asylum and migration, even by liberal political parties. Taking this as a point of departure, the course investigates post-millennial literature by Black authors and authors of color in Germany. The course will focus on the entanglement of politics and aesthetics, as well as the emergence of new forms and narrative techniques as an intervention in contemporary Germany literature, with stories and plots becoming almost a prophecy of the political reality. We will also closely investigate how BPoC-authors write into and reshape German memory culture that is usually thought of as belonging to white majority society. How do racist killings infiltrate plots and change narrative structures? How is German collective remembrance being (re)shaped with stories by marginalized authors on the Holocaust, the history of German colonialism and other genocides? How is Europe being represented? Where does it end? What transnational alliances, networks, and solidarities are made im/possible? These are some of the many questions the course aims to tackle. The course is taught in English. All readings are available in German and English

CSER UN1010 INTRO TO COMP ETHNIC STUDIES. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Students MUST register for a Discussion Section.

Introduction to the field of comparative ethnic studies

HIST UN3030 IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP IN AMER HIST. 4.00 points.

This course explores the meaning of American citizenship in connection with the country’s immigration history. Topics include historic pathways to citizenship for migrants; barriers to citizenship including wealth, race, gender, beliefs and documentation; and critical issues such as colonialism, statelessness, dual nationality, and birthright citizenship. We will ask how have people become citizens and under what authority has that citizenship been granted? What are the historic barriers to citizenship and how have they shifted over time? What major questions remain unanswered by Congress and the Supreme Court regarding the rights of migrants to attain and retain American citizenship?

CSER UN3490 POST 9/11 IMMIGRATION POLICIES. 4.00 points.

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? Who stands to benefit from these enforcement strategies? Do immigrant communities feel safer in the U.S.? How have states joined the federal bandwagon of immigration enforcement or created solutions to an inflexible, broken immigration system?

CSER UN3523 INTRODUCTION TO LATINX STUDIES. 4.00 points.

In the US, Latinxs are often treated in quantitative terms—as checkmarks on census forms, or as data points in demographic surveys. However, Latinxs have always been more than mere numbers: while some have stayed rooted in traditional homelands, and while others have migrated through far-flung diasporas, all have drawn on and developed distinctive ways of imagining and inhabiting the Americas. In this course, we will explore a wide range of these Latinx lifeways. Through readings in the humanities and social sciences, we will learn how Latinxs have survived amidst and against settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Meanwhile, through the study of literature and art, we will see how Latinxs have resisted and/or reinforced these social systems. With our interdisciplinary and intersectional approach, we will determine why Latinidad has manifested differently in colonial territories (especially Puerto Rico), regional communities (especially the US–Mexico borderlands), and transnational diasporas (of Cubans, of Dominicans, and of a variety of Central Americans). At the same time, we will understand how Latinxs have struggled with shared issues, such as (anti-) Blackness and (anti-)Indigeneity, gender and sexuality, citizenship and (il)legality, and economic and environmental (in)justice. During the semester, we will practice Latinx studies both collectively and individually: to enrich our in-class discussions, each student will complete a reading journal, a five- page paper, a creative project, and a digital timeline

CSER UN3702 Memory and Monuments in the U.S. West. 4.00 points.

This class explores the relationships among memory, monuments, place, and political power in the United States West. The course begins with an introduction to the theory of collective memory and then delves into case studies in New Mexico, California, and Texas. We will expand our perspective at the end of the course to compare what we have learned with the recent debates over monuments to the Confederacy. We will consider both physical manifestations of collective memory such as monuments and architecture as well as intangible expressions like performance, oral history and folklore

CSER UN3919 MODES OF INQUIRY. 4.00 points.

Corequisites: CSER UN3921
Corequisites: CSER UN3921 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 AMER CINEMA. 4.00 points.

Enrollment limited to 22.

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 Hollywood Orientalist stereotypes. We will analyze various issues confronting the Asian American, including yellowface, white patriarchy, male and female stereotypes, the “model minority” myth, depictions of “Chinatowns,” 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

CSER UN3926 LATIN MUSIC AND IDENTITY. 4.00 points.

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 COLONIZATION/DECOLONIZATION. 4.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement
Enrollment limited to 22.

Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructor's permission.
Prerequisites: Open to CSER majors/concentrators only. Others may be allowed to register with the instructors 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. The course ends with a section on decolonization and post-colonialism in the period after World War II. Intensive reading and discussion of primary documents

CSER UN3935 Historical Anthropology of the US-Mexico Border. 4 points.

Beginning in the 1980s, border crossing became an academic rage in the humanities and the social sciences. This was a consequence of globalization, an historical process that reconfigured the boundaries between economy, society, and culture; and it was also a primary theme of post-modernist aesthetics, which celebrated playful borrowing of multiple and diverse historical references. Within that frame, interest in the US-Mexican border shifted dramatically. Since that border is the longest and most intensively crossed boundary between a rich and a poor country, it became a paradigmatic point of reference. Places like Tijuana or El Paso, with their rather seedy reputation, had until then been of interest principally to local residents, but they now became exemplars of post-modern “hybridity,” and were meant to inspire the kind of transnational scholarship that is required in today’s world. Indeed, the border itself became a metaphor, a movable imaginary boundary that marks ethnic and racial distinction in American and Mexican cities. This course is an introduction to the historical formation of the US-Mexican border.

CSER UN3942 RACE AND RACISMS. 4.00 points.

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

SOCI UN3968 IMMIGRATION, RACE, AND ASIAN AMERICANS. 4.00 points.

Drawing from evidenced-based social science research, this course will equip students to understand how the laws and policies of America’s past continue to affect the experiences, trajectories, and perceptions of Asian Americans today. Tracing the racial mobility of Asian Americans from “unassimilable to exceptional”, we begin by studying legacies of exclusion and then examine Asian Americans’ experiences in education, affirmative action, the workplace, and the surge of anti-Asian violence during the Covid-19 pandemic

CSER GU4360 AMER DIVA:RACE,GDNDR＆PERFMNC. 4.00 points.

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 explores 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 in American culture. Students in this course will theorize the cultural function and constitutive aspects of the diva and will analyze particular performances of a range of American divas from the 20th and 21st centuries and their respective roles in (re)defining American popular culture

CSER GR5000 INTRO TO AMERICAN STUDIES. 3.00 points.

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?