American Culture Course Offerings
- Term-specific descriptions for all LSA courses are available through the LSA Course Guide.
- A complete catalog of all American Culture courses is available through the LSA Bulletin Please note that not every class will be taught every year.
- Students interested in proposing an independent study need to complete an independent study contract (PDF) in consultation with the faculty member of their choosing. The application deadline is the end of the first full week of classes in the term for which the student is applying.
- Information about how American Culture handles waitlists and requests for overrides can be obtained by clicking here.
Featured Fall 2008 Courses
AMCULT 215 Introduction to Arab American Studies
Nadine Naber, Humanities Distribution, Race and Ethnicity
CANCELLED
AMCULT 226 The Latin Tinge: Latin Music in Social Context in Latin America and the U.S.
Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Humanities Distribution
This is a pilot course that experiments with multimedia lectures and podcasting as ways to introduce the social history of key Latin musical styles. Students download listening and video-viewing assignments to their computers or MP3 players, and write about both these assignments as well as their assigned readings. Listening and viewing is paired with analysis of the social contexts and social meanings of musical production and consumption. Students consider how "Latin," musics emerged from persecuted Afro-diasporic musical styles into (often shallow) celebrations of mixed national identity. They will see how music is entangled in the international interplay between colonizing audiences and exotic racial others, but is often also a basis for interchange in a Black Atlantic and oppositional social identity among Latino migrants in the United States. In short, viewing Latin music in social context means thinking about music as a complicated site for the working out of colonialism, international cultural markets, race, and ethnicity.
AMCULT 335 Arts and Culture in American Life
Paul Anderson, Humanities Distribution
An advanced introduction to the arts in 20th-century U.S. cultural history, this course will establish the late nineteenth-century context and then survey some key topics in twentieth-century American artistic life and popular culture. Special emphasis will be placed on black/white relations in the arts, the politics of culture in the first half of the 20th century, and the shifting meanings of modernism and postmodernism. We will approach these themes especially through developments in music, literature, art, and film. The multidisciplinary perspective developed here will introduce students to the comparative interpretation of a spectrum of cultural phenomena - including the high modernist poetry of T.S. Eliot, Duke Ellington's jazz music, Hollywood comedy during the Great Depression, Zora Neale Hurston's Harlem Renaissance literature, Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionist painting, the soul music of Aretha Franklin, and the postmodernist ideas lurking within popular films like "The Matrix" - as sites of historical inquiry. The course will explore how the elite art practices and discourses of modernism and postmodernism developed not in an isolated vacuum but rather as symbiotic responses to the ever changing commercialization of cultural life and ordinary leisure. Therefore, the rise and transformation of mass culture will be of particular interest. As the course moves up to the present time, we will emphasize how the multiple worlds of popular music continue to serve as battlegrounds over the representation of gender roles, cultural identity, and racial and ethnic diversity. The format will be two lectures per week plus a required discussion section. There will also be several required film screenings outside of class. Requirements should include attendance, midterm and final exam, brief written commentaries, and periodic reading quizzes.
AMCULT 381 Latinas/Latinos and the Media
Larry LaFountain-Stokes, Humanities Distribution
Examines the access and contributions of Latinas/Latinos to the U.S. media from a range of creative positions: producer, performer, director, screenwriter, audience member, and activist. Following an historical overview that focuses on the periods in which Latina/os have been most actively recruited for participation in, and consumption of, U.S. film and television - the early thirties, the forties, and the eighties - there will be a culminating emphasis on the contemporary period, with a survey of Latina/o participation in independent cinema and mainstream media. The cultural scope is pan-Latino, from New York to Los Angeles, and the course covers a range of genres and formats, from documentary to experimental film, and Spanish-language and bilingual television. The interaction and contrast among these formats are also considered. Special topics to be addressed include gender relations, language, and racial politics, the crossover phenomenon, community media and cultural citizenship, and the growing trend towards transnational production and distribution. The goal is to move beyond issues of stardom and marketing into the equally crucial realms of aesthetics, agency, and advocacy.
