Ethnic Studies

This course explores some of the relationships between ethnicity, migration, imperialism, place, race, technology, and modernisms in US artistic and literary culture from the turn of the 20th century through to the 1930s. The period under question includes cultural responses to the fallout of late 19th-century governmental Americanisation projects; competing claims for the ‘new’; responses to the Great Depression and New Deal state interventions; and the development of an American modernist aesthetic avant-garde. Students focus on four points of activity: New Mexico, the Mid-West, Paris, and New York. In each case students look at written texts within an interdisciplinary approach that learns from looking at painting and photography, journalism and the world of ‘little magazines’, new styles of dance and, of course, jazz.

This interdisciplinary course practices a critical way of examining contemporary cultural practices. In these practices of production, dissemination, and reception, masculinity and femininity are permanently (re)constructed, just as are concepts of class, race, ethnicity, and geopolitical location. Students study cultural practices manifest through popular culture as well as examine the cultural logic underlying art practice and visual ethnographic research. In all, old and new identities are contested and reconstructed; the interaction between text and image is the main focus.