The Window at Montgomery Place

 

Course Number: HIST 123

CRN Number: 90230

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Myra Armstead

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM11:30 AM Olin 204

 

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies

In 1802, Janet Montgomery began to convert her 380-acre riverfront property from a “wilderness” into a “pleasure ground.” This transformation reflected prevailing ideas about the ideal aesthetic relationship between humans and nature as well as emerging notions regarding scientific agriculture. Development of the property also mirrored contemporary social and cultural conventions, as the estate was populated by indentured servants, tenants, slaves, free workers, and elites. This course approaches Montgomery Place as a laboratory for understanding social hierarchies, cultural practices, and evolving visions of nation and “place.”  In Fall 2022, we will focus on Montgomery as a case study of slavery and slaveholding in the antebellum Hudson Valley.

 

Migrants and Refugees in the Americas

 

Course Number: HIST 225

CRN Number: 90227

Class cap: 18

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Miles Rodriguez

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM1:10 PM Olin 301

 

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: American Studies; Architecture; Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Latin American/Iberian Studies

The Border. The Ban. The Wall. Raids. Deportations. Separation of Families. Immigrant Rights. Sanctuary. Refugee Resettlement. These words – usually confined to policy, enforcement, and activism related to migrants and refugees – have recently exploded into the public view and entered into constant use. The current political administration made migratory and refugee enforcement, and of migration more generally, a centerpiece of its electoral campaign and the subject of its first executive orders, generating broad public controversy. Most migration to the US is from Latin America, by far the largest single migrant population is from Mexico, and the rise of Central American migration has proved enduring. Focusing on south-north migration from these Latin American regions, this class argues that it is impossible to understand the current political situation in the US without studying the relatively lesser-known history of migrant and refugee human rights over the last three decades, including massive protests, movements for sanctuary, and attempts at reform and enforcement. The class takes into account shifting global demographics, changing reasons for migration, rapid legal and political changes, complex enforcement  policies and practices, and powerful community movements for reform, which are often forgotten  with the opening and closing of a given news cycle. The class also argues that migrant and refugee voices matter and are critical to understanding migration as an historical and current problem. The course includes migrant, refugee, and activist narratives, and an array of historical, legal, political, and other primary sources. Its goal is to create a more complete historical understanding of Latin American-origin migration in the contemporary US context. This course is part of the Liberal Arts Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education initiative. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

 

Latin America: Race, Religion and Revolution

 

Course Number: HIST 331

CRN Number: 90240

Class cap: 15

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Miles Rodriguez

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      12:30 PM2:50 PM Olin 303

 

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: American Studies; Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Latin American/Iberian Studies; Study of Religions

This research seminar will study the violent interactions between race, religion, and revolution in Latin America from the early twentieth-century to the present, to understand how these interactions have mattered to the region’s history and how they explain some of its most violent current conflicts. The very name “Latin America” derived from and became associated with specific racial, religious, and revolutionary meanings through a history of violence. The seminar will begin by studying how racial concepts formed and became fixed ideas through distinct revolutionary-inspired intellectual debates on interracial mixture and indigenous rights. Based in Mexico and Peru, the formation of concepts like global mestizaje, a “cosmic race,” and indigenismo involved rival valuations of each nation’s indigenous and colonial histories and cultures, with lasting effects. The seminar will then explore the simultaneous rise of wars and conflicts over radically different religious meanings and faiths, within and outside of Catholicism, including native religions and the rise of Evangelical Protestant Christianity. The latter part of the seminar will focus on Guatemala, which dramatically combined extreme violence over race, religion, and revolution, and focused global attention on indigenous rights and human rights. These histories will allow for a deeper understanding of the rise of different forms of violence in Central America today, and therefore of the current human rights, migrant, and refugee crisis centered there and involving other parts of Latin America and the US. This seminar emphasizes the narratives, interpretations, and voices of participants in the history, and critical engagement with these primary sources in the writing of the history. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

 

Human Rights to Civil Rights

 

Course Number: HR 189

CRN Number: 90244

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Kwame Holmes

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     10:10 AM – 11:30 AM Olin Language Center 118

 

Distributional Area:

HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies

(HRP Core course) For much of the 20th century, Civil Rights activists and Human Rights advocates worked hand-in-hand. Their shared target: state actors and global systems that exploited human bodies and denied human dignity in the name of prejudice, nationalism and profit. Yet in the 1960s, a new wave of social movements representing Black, Feminist, LGBTQ, Chicano, Indigenous and Disabled perspectives shattered this consensus, demanding an identity-based approach to civil rights advocacy and pushing against notions of universal human rights. This seminar will introduce students to the history of this conflict, and allow them to explore for themselves the benefits and/or costs of advocating for social justice through the figure of “the human” or through the filter of identity. Students will be introduced to the foundational writings of identity-based movement leaders, with an eye for their applicability to contemporary struggles over immigration, anti-trans violence, mass incarceration and police violence. We will consider the relative efficacy of direct action, lawsuits, media campaigns and civil disobedience.

 

Introduction to Multicultural Philosophy

 

Course Number: PHIL 104

CRN Number: 90257

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Yarran Hominh

 

Schedule/Location:

Mon  Wed     11:50 AM1:10 PM Hegeman 308

 

Distributional Area:

MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice

What does it mean to be human? What should we do in life? Does anything we do REALLY matter? We will examine these and other fundamental philosophical questions, drawing on a diverse range of traditions from across the world. Readings will be selected from African, Arabic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Western thought.

 

Theories of Racial Capitalism

 

Course Number: PS 397

CRN Number: 90276

Class cap: 12

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Lucas Pinheiro

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue      3:10 PM5:30 PM Olin 304

 

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis  

 

Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Philosophy

This seminar explores theories of the historical relationship between ideologies of racial difference and practices of capital accumulation since the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Students will examine the ways in which a host of thinkers, critics, and historians have formulated and employed the concept of “racial capitalism” to reimagine and confront the entanglement of race and capitalism in two central ways: first, as a theory of capitalism in which the movement, settlement, and economic exploitation of people of color is seen as indissociable from regimes of capital accumulation; and second, as a critique of standard accounts of capitalism that view racism as a cultural deviation from the market’s economic logic. We will begin by engaging contemporary theories of racial capitalism since the 1970s, paying particular attention to the theoretical arguments and historical methods scholars have used to think about racism as an internal and structural feature of capitalist development. We will then turn to key texts and constitutive moments in the histories of Black political thought and global capitalism that will invite us to reflect on “racial capitalism” as a conceptual and historical category for critically understanding the convergence of race and capitalism in a long-range international context. In addition to reading classic texts by Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Barbara Fields, Saidiya Hartman, and others, we will focus on the socioeconomic transformations to which their works responded, including racial slavery, settler colonialism, Jim Crow, the underdevelopment of Africa, neoliberal economic reform, and mass incarceration. Through readings, in-class discussions, presentations, and a final research paper, students will be introduced to a wide range of theoretical and historical approaches to interpreting race and capitalism while also learning about key concepts and debates in critical race theory, Black feminist thought, and the history of political economy.

 

Sociology of Race & Ethnicity

 

Course Number: SOC 122

CRN Number: 90280

Class cap: 22

Credits: 4

 

Professor:

Jomaira Salas Pujos

 

Schedule/Location:

 Tue  Thurs    1:30 PM2:50 PM Olin 203

 

Distributional Area:

SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice

 

Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies; Human Rights; Latin American/Iberian Studies

The Movement for Black Lives, the rise of white nationalist groups, and U.S. racial demographic changes have put issues of race and racism at the forefront of national conversations, but what is race and how did it become so important? This course introduces students to sociological approaches to race and ethnicity. We will examine race as a socially constructed category by engaging with multiple sociological theories and accounts of contemporary racial problems. We will answer questions such as, what is meant when we say race is socially constructed and not biological? What are the sociohistorical processes that have cemented racial stratification? And how does the lived experience of being racialized intersect with other social categories such as gender, immigration status, and socioeconomic class? Together, we will also tackle the task of defining, deconstructing, and connecting concepts such as racism, discrimination, anti-Blackness, and intersectionality. At the end of the course, students will discuss the consequences of race and ethnicity and consider alternatives for social change.