Coordinating Instructor: Floyd Cheung
Office: College Hall 302; tel: 585-2141
eMail: fcheung@smith.edu
Collaborating Instructors: Rob Dorit, Christen Mucher, Daphne Lamothe, Jen Malkowski, Erin Pineda, Javier Puente, and Jina Kim
Guest Lecturer: Rachel Rubinstein
Location: Stoddard G2
Time: Mondays from 7:30-9:00 p.m.
We will meet beginning on February 10. Students may earn one credit. Staff and faculty may audit.
This course offers an interdisciplinary, historical, critical examination of race in the United States. Although race is no longer held by scientists to have any biological reality, it has obviously played a central role in the formation of legal codes (from segregation to affirmative action), definitions of citizenship, economics (from slavery to discriminatory loan arrangements), culture (music, dance, literature, fashion), and identities. Where did the concept of race come from? How has it changed over time and across space? What pressures does it continue to exert on our lives? How does it intersect with other registers of identity like class, gender, sexuality, and disability? By bringing together faculty from a variety of programs and disciplines, and by looking at a range of cultural texts, visual images, and historical events where racial distinctions and identities have been deployed, constructed and contested, we hope to give students an understanding of how and why race matters.
