Ethnic and Minority Cultures
ETHNIC AND MINORITY CULTURES
Fall 2015
BTAN33004BA13
Urban Underworlds:
A Geography of American Culture
Instructor: Erika Mikó
Time: Monday 10-12,
Place Lecture Hall II (Main Building)
Email:
Office: Main Building, Room 116/1
Office hours: Tue 12-13; Wed 10-11 or by appointment
Course Description
This course will examine how and why marginalized populations—immigrant American in the Lower East Side, gays and lesbians in Greenwich Village, the black underclass in Harlem and Chicago, and the new urban poor dispersed across American cities—have been selectively targeted as “urban underworlds” and their neighborhoods characterized as miasmas of disease and moral ruin. We will look into how the quarantining of minority cultures helped to promote white, middle-class privilege, and how slumming, this once-popular pastime prompted thousands of well-to-do whites to explore a range of urban spaces associated with working-class southern and eastern European immigrants, Chinese immigrants, and blacks. We will trace successive generations of white slummers, who set their sights, first, on the tearooms of “free-loving” bohemian artists and radicals, before turning their attention to the jazz cabarets of urban blacks and, finally, to the speakeasies and nightclubs associated with lesbians and gay men. In each case, we will conduct an investigation of American cities’ changing populations and neighborhoods.
Requirements
Most of the class sessions are to be based on the discussion of the topics at hand, introduced and moderated by the instructor and/or a student giving a presentation and being in charge of that topic. This discussion is to be facilitated by way of both common and individualized reading materials, visual aids, Internet resources, and documentaries. In addition, each student will give a 20-minute presentation during the semester on pre-approved topics, prepared on the basis of the instructions discussed during the first class. There will also be a mid-term and an end-term test. The details of the specific assignments and other issues will be discussed during orientation.
Presentations
Each student is required to choose a presentation topic from the issues indicated under the weekly discussion topics, or recommended either by the instructor or the students. Presentations should be about 20 minutes in length and should be interactive (with thought-provoking questions to the class or various activities). A typed handout strictly not longer than one page should be handed in to the instructor ONE WEEK before the presentation for overview. Only handouts approved by the instructor can be presented. The handout should be only a guideline to the presentation and not a word-by-word transcript. You must not read out your presentation. The content of your talk, your performance and presentation skills as well as your pronunciation will be evaluated. Students are advised to prepare a Power Point slide show along with the printed handout. The PPT is subject to the same rules as above. If someone does not show up when his/her presentation is due and does not notify the instructor in advance, he/she will lose all the credit points on the assignment.
Evaluation
The final grade will be calculated from the grades assigned on class participation (20%), presentation (30%), and the two tests (50%). More than three absences will result in a “not fulfilled” grade. Grades will be assigned according to the following conversion formulae: 0-60% = fail; 61-70% = satisfactory; 71-80% = average; 81-90% = good; 91-100% = excellent.
Further Rules
It is an essential part of the course requirements to attend all class meetings. If you must miss a class because of illness or emergency, please let me know, and make arrangements to complete any work missed.
Students may not miss more than three classes under any circumstances. Students are kindly requested to contact their tutor at least a day before class if they are to make a presentation but cannot attend. If you do not turn up on occasions when course assignments (presentation, response papers, in-class debate) and quizzes are due and you fail to notify the tutor you will lose all the credit points on the particular assignment.
There is no excuse not to come to class when the end-term is due.
Academic dishonesty or Plagiarism (failure to acknowledge and note the use of another writer’s words and ideas) is both unethical and illegal and will result in a failure of the course.
Tardiness and early departures are not allowable. They are offensive to your fellow students and to the instructor because they disrupt class work. If you have a compelling reason for arriving late or leaving early, speak with your instructor about the problem. If you regularly cut the beginning and/or the end of class sessions, it can add up to unexcused full-class-time absences.
Schedule of classes and topics
REGISTRATION WEEK (September 7-11)
Week 1 (September 14)
Orientation and introduction to the course
Week 2 (September 21)
The Rise of Urban America: A brief historical and cultural overview of the United States in the first half of the 20th century
Reading: Zsolt Virágos, The Modernists and Others: [2.4.1] The 1900s and 1910s: The Progressive Era (36-46)
I The Spatial Dynamics of Slumming and the Emergence of Commercial Leisure
Week 3 (September 28)
An overview and an underview: uneven development and the social production of American underworlds
Reading: Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives (Introduction, Chapters I, II, III, IV)
Week 4 (October 5)
Going down: Narratives of Slumming in the Ethnic Underworlds of Lower New York, 1890s -1910s, remapping Lower New York in the late nineteenth century travel guide
Reading: William Meloney: “Slumming in New York’s Chinatown: A Glimpse into the Sordid Underworld of the Mott Street Quarter, Where Elsie Sigel Formed Her Fatal Associations”
Jacob Riis: How the Other Half Lives (Chapter IX, “Chinatown”)
Week 5 (October 12)
Degenerate Sex and the City: “Below Bohemia”: Zoning, New Urban Amusements, and Djuna Barnes in the Era of the City Practical
Reading: Djuna Barnes: “How the Villagers Amuse Themselves,” “Greenwich Village as It Is”
II The Changing Conceptualization of Race in the Slumming Vogues of New York
Week 6 (October 19)
Migration and urbanization; the role of Harlem in the development of African American urban culture: cultural capital versus ghetto
Reading: Langston Hughes: “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” Claude McKay: “Harlem Shadows,” Virágos Zsolt: The Modernist and Others [2.5.3] “The Harlem Renaissance”
Week 7 CONSULTATION WEEK (October 23-30)
Week 8 (November 2)
Underground Harlem: The Pathology of American Democracy 1
Reading: Ralph Ellison: “Harlem is Nowhere,” Richard Wright: “The Man Who Lived Underground”
Week 9 (November 9)
Underground Harlem: The Pathology of American Democracy 2
Reading: Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Week 10 (November 16) – Mid-term Test
III Queering the Underworld
Week 11 (November 23)
The hermeneutics of sexual suspicion and the suspicion of sexual hermeneutics
Reading: Edward Winslow Martin: The Secrets of the Great City: a Work Descriptive of the Virtues and the Vices, the Mysteries, Miseries and Crimes of New York
Week 12 (November 30)
Willa Cather’s experiment in luxury
Reading: Willa Cather: “Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament”
Week 13 (December 7)
The forging of queer identities in the early twentieth century
Reading: George Chauncey: “The Strange Career of the Closet”
Week 14 (December 14) – End-term Test