American Studies 6XX

Sense of Place: A Framework for Exploring American Culture(s)

Instructor: Kirsten Crase

Phone: 301-314-7749

Time and Location: TBA

Email: klcrase@umd.edu

Office: Holzapfel Hall

Office Hours: TBA

Course Description
What is "a sense of place?" What does it mean to be a person in a place? How do people shape places, and how are they shaped by them? Can places be in our minds as well as etched in the physical landscape? Are our identities a kind of place, in and of themselves? What role has "a sense of place" played in the construction of American identities?

This course explores these questions, as well as many others, as it introduces graduate students to the concept of sense of place as a framework for examining identities, cultural forms, social and political processes, and human-environment connections. Sense of place is a hybrid, multidimensional concept by nature, and our approahces to it will be similarly interdisciplinary. We will draw from scholarship in American Studies, geography, cultural landscape studies, material culture, history, ethnography, folklore, literature, planning and preservation, environmental studies, documentary, and photography. We will also explore sense of place by means of a variety of important frameworks within contemporary American Studies, including race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, social and environmental justice, public history, border studies, transnationality, and globalization. The readings are primarily scholarly, but also represent the works of writers, artists, and public servants.

The objective of this course is to explore and problematize the concept of sense of place and to examine the means by which it shapes and intersects with important cultural, social, political, and environmental processes and discourses in American society.

Part I: Laying the Foundation

Week 1: Introductions

Farah Jasmine Griffin, 'Who set you flowin': The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford University Press, 1995): Introduction, Chapter 2.

Week 2: What is a Sense of Place?

Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (The New Press, 1997): Introduction, Chapters 1, 2, and 6.

Kent Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (University of Iowa Press, 1993): Foreword, Preface, and Prologue.

Yi-Fu Tuan, "Place: An Experiential Perspective," The Geographical Review 65 (1975): 151-165.

Barbara Kingsolver, "Knowing our Place," Mother Earth News October/November 2001, Issue 188.

Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference," Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 7-25.

Scott Russell Sanders, "Homeplace: A few words on behalf of staying put," Utne Reader January/February 1993, Issue 55: 95-102.

Week 3: Sense of Place and Cultural Landscapes

Peirce Lewis, "The Monument and the Bungalow: The Intellectual Legacy of J.B. Jackson," in Chris Wilson and Paul Groth, eds., Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J.B. Jackson (University of California Press, 2003): pages 85-108.

D.W. Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene," in Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (Oxford University Press, 1979): pages 33-48.

Jeremy Korr, "A Proposed Model for Cultural Landscape Study," Material Culture 29 (1997): 1-18.

Tim Cresswell, "Landscape and the Obliteration of Practice," in Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift, eds., Handbook of Cultural Geography (Sage Publications, 2003): pages 269-281.

Richard H. Schein, "The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 87 (1997): 660-680.

James Rojas, "The Enacted Environment: Examining the Streets and Yards of East Los Angeles," in Everyday America: pages 275-292.

Week 4: Constructing, Re-Constructing, and Claiming Sense of Place: Memory and Preservation

Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (MIT Press, 1995): Part I, select two chapters from Part II.

Gail Dubrow and Donna Graves, Sento at Sixth and Main: Preserving Landmarks of Japanese American Heritage (Seattle Arts Commission, 2002).

Betti-Sue Hertz, Ed Eisenberg, and Lisa Maya Knauer, "Queer Spaces in New York City: Places of Struggle, Places of Strength," in Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, eds., Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (Bay Press, 1997): 356-370.

Luis Aponte-Pares, "Appropriating Place in Puerto Rican Barrios: Preserving Contemporary Urban Landscapes," in Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick, eds., Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000): 94-111.

Part II: Various Manifestations of Sense of Place

Week 5: Sense of Place and the Environment I: Nature and Culture

William Cronon, "Introduction: In Search of Nature," in Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (W.W. Norton and Company, 1995): pages 23-56.

William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: pages 69-90.

Anne Whiston Spirn, "Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted," in Uncommon Ground: pages 91-113.

Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," in Simon During ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (Routledge: 1993): pages 271-291.

Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (Hill and Wang, 1995).

Week 6: Sense of Place and Environment II: Civic Space, the Commons, and Justice

Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic," A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford University Press, 1949): pages 201-226.

Wendell Berry, "People, Land, and Community," Standing by Words: Essays by Wendell Berry (North Point Press, 1983): pages 64-79.

James A. Throgmorton, "Imagining Sustainable Places," in Barbara Eckstein and James A. Throgmorton, eds., Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities (MIT Press, 2003): pages 39-61.

Leonie Sandercock, "Dreaming the Sustainable City: Organizing Hope, Negotiating Fear, Mediating Memory," in Story and Sustainability: pages 143-164.

Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (Guilford Press, 2003): Introduction and Chapter 4.

Giovanna Di Chiro, "Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environmental and Social Justice," in Uncommon Ground: pages 298-320.

David W. Orr, "The Constitution of Nature," The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror (Island Press, 2004).

Week 7: Sense of Place as Ideology I: Myth and Authenticity

Chris Wilson, The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition (University of New Mexico Press, 1997): All but chapters 4 and 8.

Joseph S. Wood, "'Build, Therefore, Your Own World': The New England Village as Settlement Ideal," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81 (1991): 32-50.

James S. and Nancy G. Duncan, The Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb (Routledge, 2004): All but chapters 2 and 7.

Week 8: Sense of Place as Ideology II: Place, Space, and Nation in America

Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," 1893. Click here for an online version. Click on the table of contents, then chapter 1.

Barry Marks, "The Concept of Myth in Virgin Land," American Quarterly 5 (1953): 71-76.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1991, Revised Edition): Chapters 1 and 11.

Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (Routledge, 1990): Chapters 1 and 16.

Gail Bederman, "Theodore Roosevelt: Manhood, Nation, and Civilization," Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (University of Chicago Press, 1995).

Amy Kaplan, "Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space," Radical History Review Winter 2003, Issue 85: 82-93.

Week 9: Geography and Beyond: Borders, Boundaries, and Identities

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 1987).

Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian-American Cultural Politics (Duke University Press, 1996): Chapters 1 and 4.

Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Politics: What's Home got to do with it?" in Morag Shiach, ed., Feminism and Cultural Studies (Oxford University Press, 1999).

Paul Gilroy, "The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity," The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993): pages 1-40.

Virginia Dominguez, "Asserting (Trans)Nationalism and the Social Conditions of its Possibility," Communal/Plural 6 (1998): 139-156.

Week 10: The Death of the Local? Mobility, Hybridity, and Sense of Place in a Globalized World

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press, 1996): Chapters 1-3, 9.

James Clifford, "Traveling Cultures," in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1992): pages 96-116.

Doreen Massey, "A Global Sense of Place," in Trevor Barnes and Derek Gregroy, eds., Reading Human Geography: The Poetics and Politics of Inquiry (Arnold, 1997): pages 315-323.

Arturo Escobar, "Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization," Political Geography 20 (2001): 139-174.

Geraldine Pratt, "Geographies of Identity and Difference: Marking Boundaries," in Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Philip Sarre, eds., Human Geography Today (Polity Press, 1999): pages 151-167.

Part III: Methods of Exploring Sense of Place

Week 11: Exploring Sense of Place: Consumerism

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Knopf, 2003).

James J. Farrell, One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping (Smithsonian Press, 2003): Chapters 8 and 14.

Week 12: Exploring Sense of Place: Material Culture and Folk Art/Folklore

Henry Glassie, Material Culture (Indiana University Press, 1999): Chapter 3.

Simon J. Bronner, "Consuming Things," Grasping Things: Folk Material Culture and Mass Society in America (University Press of Kentucky, 1986): pages 160-210.

Grey Gundaker, "Introduction: Home Ground," in Grey Gundaker, ed., Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground (University Press of Virginia, 1998): pages 3-23.

Grey Gundaker, "African-American History, Cosmology, and the Moral Universe of Edward Houston's Yard," Journal of Garden History 14 (1994): 179-205.

Barbara Allen, "The Genealogical Landscape and the Southern Sense of Place," in Barbara Allen and Thomas J. Schlereth, eds., Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures (University Press of Kentucky, 1990): pages 152-163.

Week 13: Exploring Sense of Place: Ethnography and Photography

Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton University Press, 1998): Chapters 1 and 5.

Richard P. Horwitz and Karin E. Becker, The Strip: An American Place (University of Nebraska Press, 1985): Chapters 1 and 2, choose 4 of the 8 vignettes in chapter 3.

William deBuys and Alex Harris, River of Traps: A Village Life (University of New Mexico Press, 1990).

Week 14: Exploring Sense of Place: Film, Radio, and Multi-media

Elizabeth Barret, Stranger with a Camera. (Videorecording, 2000). Click here to read a brief introduction to the film. A viewing of this film prior to class will be arranged.

Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Freedom Bags. (Videorecording, 1990). We will view this film in class.

Appalshop, Holler to the Hood, radio program and multi-media project. Click here to read about this program.

Week 15: Exploring Sense of Place: Insurgent Histories

Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (Verso, 1998).

Don Mitchell, "Dead Labor and the Political Economy of Landscape--California Living, California Dying," in Handbook of Cultural Geography: pages 233-248.

Richard H. Schein, "Normative Dimensions of Landscape," in Everyday America: pages 199-218.

Course Requirements
Class members will complete weekly reading assignments, contribute regularly to class discussions, write weekly thought papers, guide one class discussion session, present a personal statement, and produce a seminar paper.

Reading and Discussion Participation
The primary goal of this course is to introduce students to a wide array of scholarly resources on sense of place, so completing and engaging with the weekly reading assignments is obviously the cornerstone of our work. We will all benefit if everyone has done their best to complete each assignment and to reflect on it a bit before coming to class. Additionally, please come to class preprared to contribute to the discussion and to engage with the contributions of your fellow class members. The classroom is a collective space; we are all teachers and learners, so please make the most of this opportunity to share and learn. We will also all benefit from remembering to treat each other and each other's opinions with respect. The classroom is also an open space where we should feel free to voice our own opinions, and to listen and respond thoughtfully and respectfully to those of others.

Weekly Thought Papers
When reading a text, we tend to have numerous responses to it, some that are scribbled in the margins and others taken down in notes, while others are left to percolate in our minds. One of the best means of both crystallizing and giving form to those responses is to actually put pen to paper (or rather, finger to keyboard) before coming to class, reflecting thoughtfully on the week's readings in a short 2-3 page paper. This exercise can be approached in many ways, with the ultimate goal being to help you recognize and make some sense of your responses, and to help stimulate engaged discussions in class. You may analyze or respond to important issue(s) raised in the texts, you may defend or critique (or both) a particular text or texts, or you may write a more synthetic essay connecting your responses to various texts. Your papers should be coherent and should represent critical thought, but this is not a highly formal assignment; you should allocate time for it accordingly.

Discussion Guiding
Each student will guide one discussion (class session) during the semester. This is an opportunity for you to play a more direct role in shaping the course of the discussion, and to present more formal responses and questions to the class. Discussion guiders should prepare a handout (to distribute to everyone in the class), which outlines key themes in each of the works assigned for that day, provides a brief assessment of the works, and poses a set of questions that the class can use to probe and work through the issues raised in that week's texts. Please feel free to come talk to me if you are unsure of how to approach a set of readings.

Personal Statement
Sense of place tends to be a concept that is understood in personal terms for many of us, so this assignment gives each of us the opportunity to reflect on what sense of place means to us and how, if at all, we view it as having shaped our identity and sense of self. The statement should be 5-10 minutes in length, and will be presented to the class. The purpose of this assignment is to allow each of us to reflect on how we have been impacted by our own "emplacement" in various places, spaces, cultures, identities, etc., and to think about the role this might play in our own intellectual work. This statement is "personal" to the extent that it is about you, your places, and your thoughts on how they've shaped you, but it is not by any means "personal" in the sense of a confessional or a full autobiographical statement. You will not be asked to tell us any more about yourself than you are comfortable doing.

Seminar Paper
The capstone project of this course will be a research paper which explores in depth a topic or sub-field relating to sense of place. You may draw your topic from the areas explored through the course syllabus, or you may choose another related topic that is of interest to you. Sense of place is a broad area of exploration, so the range of possibilities is obviously quite broad as well. Your goal should be to explore how sense of place relates to, illuminates, and is informed by some other cultural, social, political, or environmental area of focus within American Studies. Papers should be 15-20 pages in length. They should be well-researched and should represent advanced critical thinking. You are encouraged to begin thinking about this project early in the semester, and to consult with me about topic selection and any other questions you may have.

Grading
Your grade will be calculated roughly as follows:
*The personal statement will not be graded.

Rquired Texts
All books are available on reserve at McKeldin Library. Two copies each of articles and book chapters will be availiable on reserve in the coffee room in Holzapfel. Please sign articles out for copying and return them within two hours.

Academic Integrity
Please click here for information on the University of Maryland's Code of Academic Integrity.

AMST 603 Class Website
My AMST 603 Homepage