Race & Ethnicity in American Life

AA616 [691B], UMass/Amherst
Fall 1999 New Africa House 302
T 9:00-11:30 am Prof. Ernest Allen

The purpose of this course is to examine issues of race and ethnicity in American life from the colonial period to the present, with a particular focus on changes wrought to both by the transformation of U.S. immigration laws in 1965. We shall be concerned as much with the ways in which American identity has been defined by partisans of one particular view or another, as by the actual ways in which this identity has manifested itself. How have the social constructs of ethnicity and race been variously defined, and their interrelationship conceived? Once American racial identities were rigidly fixed, how did successive immigrant groups adapt their existing ethnic identities to socially and politically imposed racial categories? In what ways have concepts of ethnicity and race tended to promote/undermine the existence of working-class consciousness? What have been the gender manifestations of these concepts? In what ways have generational differences internal to ethnic or racial groups led to transformations of their group identities? What have been the mechanisms of solidarity/strife between "peoples of color" in their struggles against the dominant racism? And just how close are we to fulfilling (Rodney?) King's dream, anyway?

Two papers, ranging in length from 10 to 15 pages and addressing different aspects of race and ethnicity, are required; guidelines forthcoming.

READING SCHEDULE

September 21: In the Beginning. . . .

Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992).

September 28: Theories of Assimilation and Identity

Werner Sollors, ed., Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1996); chpts. 1-14.

October 5: Sollors, Theories of Ethnicity; chpts. 15-24.

October 12: Between Ethnicity and Race

Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995).

HOLIDAY, Monday, October 11; Follow Monday class schedule on Wednesday, October 13

October 19:

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

October 26:

Jere Takahashi, Nisei/Sansei: Shifting Japanese American Identities and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).

*FIRST PAPER DUE Wednesday, October 27

November 2:

Marilyn Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993)

November 9: Strangers in the Labor Market and Other Places

John Higham, Strangers in the Land; Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955)

HOLIDAY: Thursday, November 11; Follow Thursday class schedule on Monday, November 15

November 16:

Robert Asher and Charles Stephenson, eds., Labor Divided: Race and Ethnicity in United States Labor Struggles, 1835-1960 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990)

November 23: Race, Ethnicity, and Panethnicity after 1965

Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)

Thanksgiving Recesss: November 25-28

November 30:

Michael W. Hughey, ed., New Tribalisms: The Resurgence of Race and Ethnicity (New York: New York University Press, 1998)

December 7:

Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992)

December 14: Pyong Gap Min, Caught in the Middle: Korean Merchants in America's Multiethnic Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)

OFFICIAL LAST DAY OF CLASSES: Monday, December 13

*FINAL PAPER DUE Friday, December 17