Week 1 Introduction to the Course

Suzanne Griffith Prestien. “Past [Im]Perfect: Mythology, Nostalgia, and Baseball,” Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class and Gender in America’s Pastime (Armonk 2001), pp 158-169.

Chela Sandoval. Methodologies of the Oppressed (University of Minnesota, 2000), ch. 4.

Amy Kapalan “Left Alone in America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Amy Kapalan and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Duke, 1993), pp 3-21.

Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, “Color Blindness, History and the Law,” in Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House that Race Built (New York: Vintage, 1998), pp 280-288.

Robin D.G. Kelley, “We Are Not What We Seem,’ Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,’" J. Am. Hist. (June 1993): 75-112.

Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! (Beacon, 1997), Ch. 1.

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, (Vintage), Introduction.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17 (1992).

August Wilson Fences. New American Library (1995).

Peter Drier. “Jackie Robinson’s Legacy” Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class and Gender in America’s Pastime (Armonk 2001), pp 43-63.

Roger Kahn, “The Greatest Season,” Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class and Gender in America’s Pastime (Armonk 2001), pp 37-42.

Langston Hughes. “Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Mitchell, ed. Within the Circle, (Duke Press, 1994) pp. 55-59.

LeRoi Jones, “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature,’” in Angelyn Mitchell, ed. Within the Circle, (Duke University Press, 1994) pp. 55-59.

Handout:Countee Cullen, “Yet Do I Marvel," and “From the Dark Tower”; Paul Lauerence Dunbar “Ante-Bellum Sermon” and “We Wear the Mask”

Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (Duke University Press, 1996), chs. 1-2.

Frankenberg and Mani, “Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, Postcoloniality and the Politics of Location,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 7, no.2 (1993): 292-310.

Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Duke, 2003), Chs 1 and 2.

Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought, 2nd edition, Chs 9-10.

Farah Jasmine Griffin, Who Set You Flowin’? (Oxford, 1995) Intro and chs 1 and 3.

Kerry Yo Nakagawa, “Japanese American Baseball 1899-1999,” Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class and Gender in America’s Pastime (Armonk 2001). pp 123-140.

Joel Franks. “California Baseball’s Mixed Multitudes” Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class and Gender in America's Pastime (Armonk 2001). pp 102-123.

George Lipsitz, Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Temple, 1998) Chapter 1.

Krasner Stephen, International Pastime Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, chapter 4.

Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, “Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race ‘Postcoloniality’ and the Politics of Location,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 7, no 2. (1993): 292-310.

Isabelle Gunning, “Arrogant Perception, World Traveling, and Muticultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries,” in Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Vol. 23 no.2 (1992) 189-248.

Toni Morrison, “Home,” in Wahneema and Lubiano, ed., The House that Race Built, (New York: Vintage, 1998).

“Sammy Sosa Meets Horatio Alger: Latin Ball Players and the American Success Myth,” Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class and Gender in America’s Pastime, (Armonk 2001). pp 71-75.

Andrei Codrescu, “Borders and Shangri-La: Orlando (El Duque) Hernandez and Me,” Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class and Gender in America’s Pastime, (Armonk 2001). pp 90-101.

Gloria E. Anzaldua, “Toward a Mestiza Rhetoric,” in Interviews/Entrevistas (Routledge 2000) 251-280.

Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization University of Chicago. ch. 5.

Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975. (University of Minnesota, 1990).

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Week 11 Agency for the Player?

Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Nelson and Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313.

Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought, 2nd edition, Introduction.


Jeremy Howell, “The Corporatzation of Baseball and America,” Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class and Gender in America’s Pastime, (Armonk 2001), 207-213.

Maxine Malyneux, “Mobilization without Emancipation? Women’s Interests, the State, and Revolution in Nicaragua,” in Feminist Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (1985): 227-254.

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Week 12 Stadium and Public vs. Private Space/High vs. Low Culture

Film: Ken Burns. Baseball, Inning 8. PBS 2001.

Lawrence W. Levine. Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, (Harvard) 1986.

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Week 13 The Discourse of Baseball--Who’s Forgotten?

Rosemarie Garland Thompson, “Theorizing Disability,” in Extraordinary Bodies, (Columbia University Press, 1997): 19-51.

Lennard Davis. "Constructing Normalcy: The Bell Curve, The Novel, and the Invention of the Disabled Body in the 19th Century," in ed., Lennard Davis, The Disability Studies Reader, ( Routledge 1997) pp. 9-28.

Robert Elias, “A Fit for a Fractured Society: Baseball and the American Promise,” Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class and Gender in America's Pastime, (Armonk 2001), introduction.

Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo' Mama’s Disfunktional! (Beacon, 1997), Ch. 2.

Michael Kammen. Social Change and the 20th Century, (Basic, 1999). 7 and 9.

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Week 14 Memory, Citizenship, and Art


W.P. Kinsella. Iowa Baseball Confederacy,(Mariner Books, 1996).

Marita Stuken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering, (Berkeley Press, 1997).

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Week 15 Wrap up the Course

Film: Barry Levinson. The Natural, (Columbia, 1994)

Bernard Malamud. The Natural, (Farrarr, Strauss and Giroux, 2003).

Harely Henry. “Them Dodgers is My Gallant Knights: Fiction as History in The Natural,” Journal of Sport History vol. 19 no. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 1-20.

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Requirements:

Weekly Response Paper: A response paper that works to sort through major the ideological/theoretical issues of the week will be due at the beginning of each class. Although your paper need not arrive at specific conclusions, it should be polished and have a coherent thesis and sufficient evidence to support that thesis. (40%)

Guiding Class Discussion: Each student will facilitate discussion of a single class. Your job is to briefly summarize the theoretical pieces for the week and to create compelling discussion questions that meld the theoretical and literary/filmic pieces. Part of the job of being the facilitator is to create questions that allow us to probe race, class, gender, sexuality, power, American citizenship, etc. through the texts we read. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance. (10%)

Final Paper: Each of you will write a research paper that probes an element of American culture, using as a foundation one of the weekly topics listed on the reading syllabus. The paper should be 15-20 pages long. At the end of the semester, we will present our papers as a class, and the presentation will count for 10% of the grade for the paper. (30%)

Weekly Participation: You are required to share your insights from the readings with us. If you do not, you are robbing the class of potential ideas and thereby limiting classmates’ progression in writing and critical thinking. Therefore, you must come to class prepared to discuss and/or write about each assignment. (10%)

Supplementing the Syllabus: This is your chance to introduce to the class a work to which you are personally attached. Each student will choose an additional resource that enhances our understanding of American Studies and present it to the class. The resource can be connected to that particular class’s readings or it may contradict them; if it is totatlly unrelated please explain your motivation for including it. You will write a one-page annotation of the resource, distribute it to the class, and briefly summarize it. (10%)


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