This course explores contemporary Native American film by directors from an extensive range of tribal nations, geographies, and genders across time and space.  We’ll look at early films of the silent era by the first Native director like James Young Deer (Delaware), including White Fawn’s Devotion (1910), consider American Indian filmmaking and presence in TV and film of the 1950s and 1960s, and then move to the mainstream splash Smoke Signals (1998) by Chris Eyre (Cheyenne/Arapahoe), which first put Native American directors on the figurative “map.”  From there we’ll move to a host of independent and experimental films by Indigenous directors on both sides of the U.S./Canadian border, from films like Jeff Barnaby’s horror creations like Rhymes with Ghouls (2013) and Shelley Niro’s experimental works like The Incredible 25^th Year of Mitzi Bearclaw (2019) to speculative film such as Helen Haig-Brown’s ?E?ANX/The Cave (2009) (Tsilqot’in) and documentaries by Terry Jones (Seneca) and others, including a guest lecture with Iroquois corn soup by Jones.  The semester wraps up with a student film project, utilizing skills of editing, montage, and narratology, in order to develop a full appreciation for the work that directors perform.

Provides advanced in-depth study of literatures written by ethnic American authors. Texts may be drawn from a range of African-American, Chicano/a, Latino/a, Asian American, Native American or Indigenous literature traditions. Topics vary each semester.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: 
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Arts Sci Gen Ed: Diversity-U.S. Perspective
Departmental Category: Multicultural and Gender Studies

Taught by Penny Kelsey.

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Queering Native Film/Queer Native Film

This course explores contemporary Native American and Indigenous film by directors from a range of gender expressions, sexual orientations, and geographies.  Leveraging creative and critical works that frame the visual trope of the Native as abject, queer, and liminal, we will seek out films that centralize queerness and Nativeness within narratology, and that question their invisible status within heteronormative empire and settler colonial processes.  Further, we will examine how these films and their associated epistemologies present exemplars for sexual orientation and gender expression that are inclusive, revered, and nonpareil and/or invite critique and interventions that are integral to decolonization.

Taught by Penny Kelsey.

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Studies special topics in multicultural literature; specially designed for English majors. Topics vary each semester.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only.
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Multicultural and Gender Studies

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This course is what the title promises: an introduction to LGBT literature. Our focus will be on the American tradition, beginning with the historical question of when identifiably LGBT literature emerges. Moving into contemporary culture, we will ask questions concerning the relationship of gay identity to gay writing: must one be gay to write gay? What counts as “GLBT” literature? Is it gay content, gay authorship, gay sensibility, or something else? How does “queer” fit into or disrupt defined categories of GLBT identity and literature? Readings will include a range of genres, including fiction, poetry, drama, and essays, and  works by Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Ann Bannon, Leslie Feinberg, and Kathy Acker, among others.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: 
Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only.
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Multicultural and Gender Studies

Taught by Mary Klages.

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Explores literary form and language in a wide range of cultures, introducing students to the global English literary tradition, comprising multiple lineages. Introduces students to poetry, narrative, drama, orality, media, digitality, and/or other genres drawn from diverse traditions, each locally historicized and contextualized.

Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities

“[A] genealogy of world literature leads to Orientalism”. So writes Aamir Mufti in his recent book Forget English! (2016). Taking Mufti’s cue, this course seeks to trace the constitution of the category of “world literature” back to what Raymond Schwab characterizes as Europe’s “Oriental Renaissance” of the 18th and 19th centuries. Via a series of close readings, we explore how it was in the Orientalist philologist Sir William Jones’s English-language translations of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit poetry and drama that the literary and cultural heritage of the “Orient” was rendered legible for European audiences of the time. How, we then ask, does contemporary world literature register and engage this history? Looking into a range of critical, theoretical, and literary articulations of this problematic, and focusing especially on the novel as the “first truly planetary form”, we develop a critical, decolonized methodology for reading “literature” in its global contexts. We put this approach into practice through a concluding analysis of Ahdaf Soueif’s novel The Map of Love.

Course assignments include: regular contributions to class discussions; a presentation; a midterm essay (2,000 words); a final essay (4-5,000 words); and three contributions to a class blog.

Taught by Karim Mattar.

The Novel and the Intimacies of Empire

It should be noted that the novel always includes in itself the activity of coming to know another’s world, a coming to knowledge whose process is represented in the novel.” So wrote Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel.” This class explores the novel as a form shaped by imperialism. The modern novel emerged amidst the expansion of the British empire, and from its inception through today has marked what scholar Lisa Lowe refers to as the intimacies of continents—intimacies of settler, cultural, and economic imperialisms. We will consider the novel as a site of intersection: not only of voices but also of ways of knowing and navigating the world. Authors may include Aphra Behn, Zora Neale Hurston, Carmen Boullosa, Amitav Ghosh, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk.

Taught by Maria Windell.

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This seminar provides a selective overview of historic and contemporary trends in Native American and Indigenous Studies academic scholarship as well as contemporary Indigenous methodologies and theory.  The readings cover a range of Eurowestern disciplines and Indigenous epistemic practices, allowing the course to be accessible to students from a range of majors.  The course’s primary goal is to teach students Native American and Indigenous Studies methods and to ensure mastery of implementing these approaches in one’s own coursework.  

The course will incorporate indigenou languages and visiting speakers, such as Indigenous filmmaker Terry Jones (Seneca Nation of Indians) and community-based language revitalization scholar Christopher Horsethief (Blackfeet).

Taught by Dr. Penny Kelsey.

Grading Basis: Letter Grade
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Arts Sci Gen Ed: Diversity-Global Perspective
Departmental Category: Multicultural and Gender Studies

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This course explores European and American discourses, ideologies, and representations of the Middle East from the 19th century to the present. How, we ask, was a region as ethnically, religiously, culturally, and linguistically diverse as it is vast rendered amenable to the European imperial enterprise and its more recent, American incarnation? Taking our cue from Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), and drawing on a range of historical case studies from the Napoleonic Invasion of Egypt and Syria (1798-1801) through to the Invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), we address this question through critical readings of British, French, and American novels, poems, plays, films, political speeches, newspaper articles, and media discussions from across this period. In each case, we counterpoint these Euro-American representations with local, Middle Eastern literary and cultural accounts (in translation) of the event under consideration. All in all, we seek in this course to develop a critical, decolonized methodology for understanding the history of a region all too often lost to the imperial and neo-imperial imaginary.

Taught by Dr. Karim Mattar.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted:  
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Arts Sci Gen Ed: Diversity-U.S. Perspective
Departmental Category: Multicultural and Gender Studies

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In this course we will read a variety of women writers from the 18th and 19th centuries. Romanticism (1750-1832) is often called the Age of Revolution because it overturned all kinds of traditional, conformist thinking as well as sparking revolutions in America and France. During this dynamic era, writers challenged established social hierarchies, slavery, and tyranny and capitalism. Most specifically this era defied conventional gender and other social constructions and advocated for the rights of women for better education and for political and artistic freedom.

We will read revolutionary writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, gothic authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), writers working in comedy such as Jane Austen, and poets writing about the landscape, such as Charlotte Smith. 

Taught by Dr. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted:  
Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information: Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Multicultural and Gender Studies

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Instructor: Prof. Maria Windell

In Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, the system established to help slaves escape literally runs steam engines through subterranean tunnels—a fantastic riff on nineteenth-century reality. The months the protagonist Cora spends hiding in a tiny attic space to small to stand up? They undersell the seven years Harriet Jacobs spent in a similar situation. This course will explore the ways contemporary ethnic US literature has adapted, revised, and remixed history to tell stories of the US past as, also, stories of the present. Recent historical novels have taken up narratives of the earliest days of colonial slavery, the nation’s founding, American Indian slaveholding and Indian Removal, the US-Mexico borderlands, and more. In order to more fully understand the contexts upon which these novels draw—the eras in which they are set—we will also read some of the historical texts that ground these contemporary remixes. Readings may include novels by Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Carmen Boullosa, Tiya Miles, Laila Lalami, Yaa Gyasi, films including Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and the soundtrack to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Sixteenth- to nineteenth-century readings might include texts by Frederick Douglass, Cabeza de Vaca, Aphra Behn, John Rollin Ridge, Harriet Jacobs, and Nat Turner.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted:  
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Departmental Category: Multicultural and Gender Studies

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Examines a series of literary texts to consider how writers across the world have used fiction to creatively stage and reimagine gender and sexuality. Attends to the formal and narrative techniques by which these texts call attention to the fictionality--and thereby the creative malleability--of gender itself. Some cinematic and performance texts will also be included.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted:  
Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only.
Additional Information:Arts Sci Gen Ed: Distribution-Arts Humanities
Arts Sci Gen Ed: Diversity-Global Perspective
Departmental Category: Multicultural and Gender Studies

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