Catalogue

American and Indigenous Studies

americanstudies.bard.edu

Faculty

Peter L’Official (director), Myra Young Armstead, Alex Benson, Luis Chávez, Christian Ayne Crouch, Yuval Elmelech, Jeanette Estruth, Elizabeth Frank, Simon Gilhooley, Donna Ford Grover, Hua Hsu, Mie Inouye, Suzanne Kite, Margaux Kristjansson, Christopher R. Lindner, Joshua Livingston, Allison McKim, Matthew Mutter, Joel Perlmann, Susan Fox Rogers, Julia B. Rosenbaum, Whitney Slaten, Tom Wolf

Overview

The American and Indigenous Studies Program offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of culture and society in the United States. Students take courses in a wide range of fields with the aim of learning how to study this complex subject in a sensitive and responsible way. In the introductory courses, students develop the ability to analyze a broad spectrum of materials, including novels, autobiographies, newspapers, photographs, films, songs, and websites. In junior seminars and the Senior Project, students identify and integrate relevant methodologies from at least two disciplines, creating modes of analysis appropriate to their topics. By graduation, students should have developed a base of knowledge about the past and present conditions of the American experience both at home and abroad.

Requirements

Before Moderation, students must take American Studies 101, Introduction to American and Indigenous Studies, or American Studies 102, Introduction to American Culture and Values, and at least two other courses focusing on the United States. After Moderation, they must take at least two more courses on the United States and at least two courses on non-US national cultures. One post-Moderation course on the United States must be a junior seminar; a second junior seminar in a different division is strongly encouraged. Every junior seminar culminates in a 20- to 25-page paper in which students bring multiple analytical frameworks to bear on a subject of their choice. At least two of the students’ total US-focused courses must emphasize the period before 1900. In order to ensure a variety of perspectives on students’ work, both the Moderation and Senior Project boards must consist of faculty members drawn from more than one division.

Recent Senior Projects in American Studies

• “Black Oiler,” a narrative of a Black male told through music and the lenses of different African diasporic authors
• “A Dazzling Détente: Exploring the Cultural Facets of the Kennedys’ 1961 Visit to Paris and the Instrumental Role of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy” (w/French Studies) 
• “Encountering Authenticity: A Case Study on the Cooperstown Farmers’ Museum”

Courses

Introduction to American and Indigenous Studies
American Studies 101 
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES, HISTORICAL STUDIES
Scholars in American and Indigenous studies read and interpret a broad range of artifacts (essays, literary texts, photographs, film, music, architecture, visual art, historical documents, and legal texts) in order to think critically about “America.” In this course, “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American” describes both a piercing 1961 James Baldwin essay and the process of tracing lines of connection across historical moments and media to better understand the aftereffects of enslavement, genocide, colonization, war, and migration on U.S. history and culture. 

Introduction to American Culture and Values
American Studies 102
Weighed down with the authority of custom, a national culture imposes a sense of obligation to all who belong to a society, but it affects groups and individuals differently, according to the variables of gender, race, and class. This course compares and contrasts visions of American culture during the 19th and 20th centuries. Texts by Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others.

The Haunting of America: History, Ghosts, and the Undead
American Studies 200
America’s gendered and racialized politics of empire have produced spectral spaces throughout its national narratives. Like a haunted house, America holds onto certain terrors and traumas long after the original events and people have gone. Through history, literature, and film, this course examines such spaces and the ghosts and undead swirling in public memory at the edges of our supposed reality. Events considered include Gettysburg, the Puritan witch craze, and contemporary racial unrest. Works by Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Brockden Brown, Shirley Jackson, Jordan Peele, and Victor La Salle.

Future Black
American Studies 201
CR0SS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, LITERATURE
DESIGNATED: RETHINKING PLACE INITIATIVE COURSE
How do we imagine the future of Blackness? How have we done so in the past, and how might these visions be useful in our present? This course examines how Black American and Black diasporic communities use and have used science fiction, fantasy, cosmology, and mythology as arenas in which to conjure long-lost pasts, alternate realities, and worlds still to come. Authors and artists studied may include Octavia Butler, George Clinton, Samuel Delany, Kiese Laymon, Wangechi Mutu, Sun Ra, and Tracy K. Smith. Jointly offered with CCS Bard.

Native American Religion and Philosophy
American Studies 216
DESIGNATED: RETHINKING PLACE INITIATIVE COURSE
An introduction to Native American religious and spiritual practices from a comparative intertribal perspective. By the end of the term, students should be able to identify connections and inter- relationships between these traditions and visual, artistic, and literary representations; and apply analytical frameworks through which to appreciate the complexity of Native American religion and spirituality.

Origins of the Black Cookout
American Studies 221
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES, EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
The cookout has always been an event that allows “folx” to celebrate culture, fellowship with new and old faces, and generally preserve the legacy of ancestors. The practice also has had lasting economic impact for Black entrepreneurs. Interestingly, the root of the cookout—barbecuing—largely came from the Native American practice of pit cooking. This class centers around Adrian Miller’s book Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue as it explores the main elements that have shaped this pivotal form of placemaking among Black people.

Environmental Justice Practicum: Art, Science, and Radical Cartography
American Studies 309 / Environmental Studies 309 
See Environmental Studies 309 for a full course description.

Art, Animals, Anthropocene
American Studies 310
CROSS-LISTED: EXPERIMENTAL HUMANITIES
DESIGNATED: THINKING ANIMALS INITIATIVE
From species extinction to radioactive soil and climate change, we are now in the age of the Anthropocene. This recently proposed geologic period refers to the ways in which human activities have dramatically impacted every ecosystem on Earth. What does it mean to visually interpret our more-than-human world and explore the complicated encounters between human and nonhuman animals? Students experiment with interdisciplinary practices of art making in order to grapple with ways in which our understanding of other species relates to human self-understanding.

Indigenous Methodologies for Arts Research
American Studies 311
DESIGNATED: RETHINKING PLACE INITIATIVE COURSE
This seminar explores the connections, overlaps, and discontinuities between research-creation methodologies and Indigenous methodologies. Indigenous knowledge is created and shared through songwriting, singing, sharing, gifting, and art making. Protocols for Indigenous methodologies and ethical community engagement are discussed, as are qualitative research methods such as interviews, workshops, and communal art making. 

Cartographies of Conquest, Incarceration, and Abolition
American Studies 315
CROSS-LISTED: AFRICANA STUDIES, ANTHROPOLOGY, HUMAN RIGHTS
What is conquest and how has it permeated Western legal thought from the Crusades to the Attica uprising to the present? How is conquest manifested spatially through prisons and policing? This course looks at the birth and ongoing life of the prison on Indigenous lands. Texts include the writings of political prisoners and insurgent intellectuals at the intersections of Native, Africana, and legal studies.