Cultural Encounters Senior Seminar: Comparative Studies in Racial and Cultural Identities

St. Lawrence University
The Cultural Encounters Program

Grant Cornwell and Eve Stoddard

This capstone course will draw on students' experiences in off-campus programs to enrich and interrogate dominant U.S. assumptions about race, ethnicity, and culture. Thus the course will pursue in depth the question: What is the relationship between one's specific identities (gender, ethnicity, etc.) and one's participation in larger polities, whether regional, national, or global? The substance of the course will be comparative analysis of a series of regional case studies, initially focused on the Caribbean and North American region, then moving outward to include the areas class members have studied and lived in. Based on the location of St. Lawrence's abroad programs, we expect to cover several European countries, Kenya, and India, in addition to Trinidad and the U.S.

Course readings will be drawn from literature, contemporary cultural studies theory, and philosophy of race, gender and identity, supplemented by films shown outside of class. A significant portion of the readings will be drawn from "critical white studies," looking at the ways white supremacy has been constructed and maintained in both historically specific and transnational ways. The course will pay particular attention to the interrelations between gender and race in different regions, especially as this is revealed through attitudes toward miscegenation and mixed-race identities.

In keeping with the goals of the Cultural Encounters program, you will complete a variety of kinds of assignments during the course involving research, writing and speech. You will pursue a sustained research project, with a sequence of elements, each of which will be revised. The projects will focus on questions about racial/cultural identities synthesizing your experiences abroad (or in a culturally distinctive U.S. off-campus program), additional research, and the theoretical readings of this course. Specifically, seminar participants will research the following questions:

1) What does "multiculturalism" mean in each national context? Does the country understand itself as multicultural? What is the place of multiculturalism in national discourse, education, politics, and media?

2) How does the country understand or categorize racial and ethnic difference? Who are the groups? How do they identify?

3) Are there recognized categories of mixed race identities? What is their social standing? Are there forms of cultural hybridization or creolization?

4) What is the history of power relations between and among the groups? What are the tensions? Conflicts? Alliances?

5) How have colonialism and postcolonialism affected these understandings and relations?

Out of this preliminary research, you will be asked to develop a focused thesis. You will be given a block of class time to teach the seminar; in consultation with the instructors, you will assign appropriate readings in advance. You will be given a separate grade for the quality of the class they teach.

The second assignment is a ten-page self-reflective essay due during final exam week which draws on the theoretical readings of the seminar to trace how your own   identities have crystallized, changed, fractured, developed over the course of their college years, with particular attention to the FYP experience, Cultural Encounters and other cultural studies courses, campus social life, and study abroad, using the journals they composed while studying off-campus. Seminar members enrolled in the Cultural Encounters track will submit this as part of their CE portfolios.

Primary Texts:

Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
Rigoberta Menchu, I, Rigoberta Menchu
Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera
Bernabe, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Eloge de la Creolite
Ruth Frankenberg, ed., Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism
K.A. Appiah and A. Gutman, Color Conscious
Martha Nussbaum, For Love of Country

Course Outline:

Format: One 3-hour meeting per week

Week 1 Introductions: seminar participants, goals and requirements;
Questions about identity/ies: single or multiple, individual or social, fixed or fluctuating, given or created, contingent or essential, etc.
Film: Mississippi Masala

Week 2 Globalization: 500 Years Ago and Now
Shohat & Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism
Barber, "Jihad vs McWorld"
Kincaid, Lucy

Week 3 Diasporas: From Ancient Hebrews to Contemporary Hindus
Elliott Skinner, "The Dialectic between Diasporas and Homelands"
Naipaul, The Middle Passage
Walcott, The Antilles
Samaroo, "Early African and East Indian Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago"
Poynting, "East Indian Women in the Caribbean"
Vertovec, "Three Fundamental Spheres of Change among Indians Overseas"
Documentary: Stuart Hall, The Caribbean

Week 4 Africa and the African Diaspora
Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers
Bolivar, Natalia, " The Orishas in Cuba"
Kake, "The Impact of Afro-Americans on French-Speaking Black Africans, 1919-45"
Bob Marley, Reggae, and Rastafarianism

Week 5 Indigeneity
Silverblatt, "Becoming Indian in the Central Andes of Seventeenth-Century Peru"
Menchu, I, Rigoberto Menchu
Minh-ha, Trinh T., "No Master Territories"
Sollors, Werner, "Who is Ethnic?"
Hall, Stuart, "New Ethnicities"
Mudrooroo, "White Forms, Aboriginal Content"
Goldie, Terry, "The Representation of the Indigene"
Griffiths, Gareth, "The Myth of Authenticity"
Fee, Margery, "Who Can Write as Other?"

Week 6 Hybridity: Mestizaje, Metissage
Anzaldua, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera
Bhabha, Homi, "Culture's In-Between"

Week 7 Creolization and Creolite
Bernabe, Chamoiseau, Confiant, Eloge de la Creolite
Brother Marvin, "Jahaji Bhai"

Week 8 Whiteness
Frankenberg, Ruth, Displacing Whiteness

Week 9 Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Kenya: Student Presentations

Week 10 Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in England: Student Presentations

Week 11 Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Europe: Student Presentations

Week 12 Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in the Americas: Student Presentations

Week 13 Rethinking Identities
Appiah, K.A., & Gutmann, Amy, Color Conscious

Week 14 Rethinking Responsibilities
Nussbaum, For Love of Country