Black Lives Matter — Course Offerings at DKU 2020-21

Students who are interested in pursuing research into Black Lives Matter may be interested to take some of the following courses that will provide a foundation for understanding the historical contexts and contemporary significance of relevant issues.

Fall 2020 Session 1

Race and Racism in the US

HIST 121 Pan-Africanism: Global History of an Idea
Professor Jesse Olsavsky

Pan-Africanism began as an idea among ex-slaves and antislavery reformers in America, who believed that Africans and people of African descent across the world had common histories, common experiences, and common struggles against various forms of racism and marginalization. Pan-Africanism, which meant different things to different people, would go on to influence numerous intellectuals and social movements, from Negritude poets to African/Caribbean Independence and the American Black Power Movement. This course will examine the growth of the Pan-African idea, tracing its influence upon numerous social movements, such as Garveyism, Black Power, and Decolonization. Moreover, the course will explore the profound intellectual influences of Pan-Africanism upon literature, historywriting, feminist thought, economics, and political theory.

POLSCI 103 American Ideas and the Idea of America
Professor Selina Lai-Henderson

What is the story of the United States? What fundamental ideas of America have been formed as a nation and as an empire? Are there connections we can draw between the US today and its past? What relevance does the US have in China historically and in the present day? What place does the US have in the Chinese imagination?

In this course, we address these questions by examining a variety of texts, ranging from important founding documents, political speeches, autobiographies, and travelogues to excerpts of American novels. Through class discussions, team projects, and role plays, we will discuss fundamental concepts of America, its past and present, and explore themes such as politics and religion, race and slavery, immigration and identity, women and economics, and education and citizenship. We will also consider how America is being perceived in the world specifically within the Chinese context.

LIT 104 The American Romance of Self-Making
Professor Stephanie Anderson

This course looks at the historical origins of “self-making” and its cultural representations at different historical moments, with special attention to the ways in which “self-making” is produced by and supports systemic racial oppression. Our texts include poems and narratives by Black and Indigenous enslaved peoples, abolitionist speeches, a modernist novel about racial “passing,” and contemporary music videos.

HIST 104 American History to 1876
Professor Jesse Olsavsky

This course covers the history of North America, from pre-colonial times to the era of the America Civil War. The history of racism plays a crucial role in this course, for the fundamental features of this time period were the conquest of Indigenous territory and the mass enslavement of Africans. We will explore the paradox of how America’s great documents of freedom (the Declaration of Independence and US Constitution) also quite avowedly endorsed the enslavement of Africans and their treatment as subhuman. We will explore how essential slavery became to the American economy, how an antislavery movement rose up against it, and how the American Civil War was fought largely over the question of slavery.

ARHU 101 The Art of Interpretation 1: Written Texts
Professor Caio Yurgel

Engagement with texts, whether public or private, literary or documentary, sacred or secular, ephemeral or lasting, extraordinary or mundane, is an essential feature of humanistic thought and discourse. Using everything from early US founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence, speeches from the US Civil Rights Movement, to David Henry Hwang’s recent bilingual play, Chinglish, this course will address the function and status of writing (and of language in general). Part of the course, in particular, will address the broader questions of social injustices in relation to the recent Black Lives Matter through examining works by African American writers and civil rights leaders.

Race and Racism in the Global Context

CULMOVE 201 Migration, Inequality and Culture
Professor Titas Chakraborty

One of the goals of this course is to understand, on a global scale, the role of migration, both forced and voluntary, from the sixteenth to the twenty first century, in the creation and perpetuation of ever dynamic relationships of power and domination centered upon “race.”

Specific Topics

  • The Atlantic Slave Trade- in this class we explore how the forced migration of approximately 12 million Africans between sixteenth and nineteenth centuries created different cultural identities and relationships of power and domination, including race.
  • Convict Migration in the Indian Ocean World- In this class we learn how convict migration created racialized relationships between a highly heterogenous subject population and the rulers of British colonial state in various parts of Asia during the nineteenth century. We also learn how race relations in the Americas influenced race relations in Asia and/or was altered in the British-Asian colonial context.
  • Migration and Model Minority – In this class we study how in the twentieth century a certain section of (mostly Chinese and Indian) people became a desirable yet racialized group of immigrants in the US.
  • “Illegal” Immigration – In this class we study the history of Mexican immigration to the US and the specificity of “illegality” as a form of racialization in the context of US laws, ideas and practices regarding citizenship and immigration. We also learn how this form of racialization has affected on a global scale politics of exclusionary citizenship.

RELIG101 Comparative Religious Traditions
Professor Ben Van Overmeire

We examine the colonial history of the field of religious studies together with discourses on race and culture that it generated. We also pay attention to some ways religious traditions have both reinforced and undermined racial and ethnic privilege.

Fall 2020 Session 2

Race and Racism in the US

LIT 105 The Epic of America (The Novel)
Professor Selina Lai-Henderson

In this course, we will examine a range of works from the US canon that engage the question of mobility in relation to the themes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire. Through reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea, as well as excerpts of short stories and poetry from the early twentieth-century, we will explore the concept and ethos of the American Dream in relation to the US founding. By drawing connections between these great American novels, we will discuss how they collectively cross and challenge national, geographical, racial, and gender boundaries––and importantly––how they resonate with DKU’s core concept of “rooted globalism.”

POLISCI 207 Democratic Institutions in America
Professor Jesse Olsavsky

This course surveys America’s politics and political institutions, as well as some of the great thinkers who wrote on American politics. One week will be devoted to the issue of race, focusing on the discrimination of Latinos through immigration policy, and on the ways structural forms of racism against African Americans have shaped or even hindered America’s democratic process.

HIST 201 History Methods and Research
Professor Zach Fredman

Students will examine the Global War on Terror as part of a module on military history. Students will examine memoirs, official government records, and secondary sources that reveal how American soldiers racialized their enemies and locals with striking speed and intensity.

ARHU 101 The Art of Interpretation 1: Written Text
Professor Selina Lai-Henderson

Engagement with texts, whether public or private, literary or documentary, sacred or secular, ephemeral or lasting, extraordinary or mundane, is an essential feature of humanistic thought and discourse. Using everything from early US founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence, speeches from the US Civil Rights Movement, to David Henry Hwang’s recent bilingual play, Chinglish, this course will address the function and status of writing (and of language in general). Part of the course, in particular, will address the broader questions of social injustices in relation to the recent Black Lives Matter through examining works by African American writers and civil rights leaders.

Race and Racism in the Global Context

CULMOV 101 Cultures of Globalization
Professor Nellie Chu

What is “globalization” and what is the significance of this concept? How have global connections emerged historically? How do histories of early exploration and colonial trade relate to global connections in the present-day? This course addresses these key questions by analyzing global connections through historical and anthropological lenses. Taking DKU’s animating principle of “rooted globalism” as its guide, this class explores the spatial and temporal dimensions of worldly inter-connectedness in their multi-faceted and plural forms. Specifically, our readings and discussions show how historical and anthropological approaches have shed light on the importance of border-crossings and cross-cultural encounters in shaping social identities and differences; spatial cores and peripheries; and hierarchies and societal transformations. Attention to global encounters allows us to deepen our understanding of trade, civilization, state-building, national borders, commodification, labor, and global food chains. Together, these aspects of everyday life and social organization reveal the diversity and dynamism of globalization.

In one particular week, the course discusses Slavery and Contestations of Economic Development through the Coffee Trade, which takes the coffee bean as an object of analysis in order to examine how the coffee trade facilitated the historical emergence of the slave trade, colonial empires, and nation-states. By comparing the world coffee markets in the 18th and 19th centuries to that of the present-day, we will analyze how the coffee bean yields narratives of racial inequality, slave labor, and uneven development across various regions of the world.

Spring 2021 Session 1

Race and Racism in the US

HIST 105 American History from Reconstruction to Present
Professor Jesse Olsavsky

This course covers US history after the Civil War up until the present. After the Civil War, America had abolished slavery, and briefly experimented with radical interracial democracy, under black leadership, during Reconstruction. However, that experiment was pushed aside and anti-black racism became resurgent. Though covering many other issues, like the rise of the American economy to global dominance, this course seeks to understand how America dealt with the question of racism throughout the 20th century, and how social movements in America challenged the country to deal with it. For most of this period, full voting rights for citizens did not exist. We will explore how America gradually became a full (electoral) democracy by the 1960s, but has still been unable to fully overcome the legacies of discrimination and economic inequality that had first arose from the experience of slavery.

LIT 106 American Otherness and Otherness in America
Professor Stephanie Anderson

This course considers how racial inequality has been the foundation for structural and affective “otherness” throughout the history of the United States. We examine texts at Revolutionary, Civil War era, Modernist, Civil Rights era, and contemporary moments, exploring the tension between the ideology of equality and depictions of everyday lived experience through readings that include Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.

ARHU 101 The Art of Interpretation 1: Written Text
Professor Caio Yurgel

Engagement with texts, whether public or private, literary or documentary, sacred or secular, ephemeral or lasting, extraordinary or mundane, is an essential feature of humanistic thought and discourse. Using everything from early US founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence, speeches from the US Civil Rights Movement, to David Henry Hwang’s recent bilingual play, Chinglish, this course will address the function and status of writing (and of language in general). Part of the course, in particular, will address the broader questions of social injustices in relation to the recent Black Lives Matter through examining works by African American writers and civil rights leaders.

GCHINA 101 China in the World
Sessions by Professor Zach Fredman

Students will look at how race and gender contributed to the unmaking of the U.S.-Republic of China alliance during World War II and the Chinese Civil War.

Race and Racism in the Global Context

RELI 201 Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism
Professor Ben Van Overmeire
We examine the ethnic rhetoric of Chineseness that supports the notion of the “Three Teaching” (sanjiao), which excludes religions such as Christianity and Islam. We also examine how what is currently happening in Xinjiang is partly the result of such rhetoric.

Spring 2021 Session 2

Race and Racism in the US

LIT 213 Literature and Global Citizenship
Professor Alice Xiang

What does it mean to be a global citizen? What can literature reveal about the social, cultural, and ethical dimensions of an increasingly interconnected world? What modes of critique, formations of belonging, and possibilities for conceptualising the world —and one’s place in it— does literature offer? Through a variety of texts, paired with perspectives drawn from literary criticism as well as sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, this interdisciplinary course will explore the possibilities as well as tensions inherent in differing conceptions of both the ‘globe’ and of ‘citizenship’.

LIT 104 The American Romance of Self-Making
Professor Stephanie Anderson

This course looks at the historical origins of “self-making” and its cultural representations at different historical moments, with special attention to the ways in which “self-making” is produced by and supports systemic racial oppression. Our texts include poems and narratives by Black and Indigenous enslaved peoples, abolitionist speeches, a modernist novel about racial “passing,” and contemporary music videos.

LIT 205 American Lyric Across Borders
Professor Stephanie Anderson

Lyric poetry is often discussed as a genre that circulates across both time and space, and this course queries the many borders that it traverses, with particular attention to nation, language, and race. Through work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nathaniel Mackey, Jennifer S. Cheng, Edgar Garcia, and others, we consider multi-generational depictions of migration and how they innovate lyric poetry.

GCHINA 101 China in the World
Sessions by Professor Zach Fredman

Students will look at how race and gender contributed to the unmaking of the U.S.-Republic of China alliance during World War II and the Chinese Civil War.

ARHU 101 The Art of Interpretation 1: Written Texts
Professor Selina Lai-Henderson

Engagement with texts, whether public or private, literary or documentary, sacred or secular, ephemeral or lasting, extraordinary or mundane, is an essential feature of humanistic thought and discourse. Using everything from early US founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence, speeches from the US Civil Rights Movement, to David Henry Hwang’s recent bilingual play, Chinglish, this course will address the function and status of writing (and of language in general). Part of the course, in particular, will address the broader questions of social injustices in relation to the recent Black Lives Matter through examining works by African American writers and civil rights leaders.