360°: Poetics and Politics of Race
The goal of this 360° is to unpack how meaning is made from representations of race—from artifacts in an anthropological context, to representations in literature, to how people teach and learn.
The goal of this 360° is to unpack how meaning is made from representations of race—from artifacts in an anthropological context, to representations in literature, to how people teach and learn.
The goal of this 360° is to unpack how meaning is made from representations of race—from artifacts in an anthropological context, to representations in literature, to how people teach and learn. We will interrogate racial constructions – including the black-white binary – through an investigation of how different cultural practices play out and play into one another. How do anthropological exhibitions both reify and resist conventional racial categories? How do classical American literary texts represent racial intersection? How might contemporary educators recognize and work with issues of race, difference, and power in what and how we teach? Building on these understandings, how might we create constructive and critical new contemporary meanings of difference? We will try answering these questions by working together to curate alternative articulations in and for the city of Philadelphia and the Bryn Mawr campus.
Courses
Taught by Jody Cohen, this course investigates education as part of processes of racialization and marginalization and also as a space for challenging these processes. How do race and schooling intersect and interact? With a focus on the U.S., we look at ways in which race as a way of creating power is embedded in earlier iterations of schooling, and how race is taken up in the work of such thinkers/educators as James Baldwin and Paulo Freire. We consider how such issues play out in the contemporary moment through affirmative action, critical race theory, and decolonizing education, and in movements such as Black Lives Matter.
In this course, taught by Anne Dalke, students re-view the canon of American literature through the lenses of contemporary theory and culture, considering American literature as an institutional apparatus, under debate and by no means settled. This involves a certain amount of anti-disciplinary work: interrogating books as naturalized objects, asking how they reproduce conventional categories, and how we might re-imagine the cultural work they perform. We look at the problems of exceptionalism as we examine traditional texts relationally, comparatively, and interactively.
Both museum exhibits and “living” world’s fair exhibitions have long been deeply embedded in politics, including the persistent “othering” of African people as savages or primitives. At the turn of the 20th century, the Victorian natural history museum and its anthropological science played an important role in disseminating and authorizing images of Africa to the Western public. While paying attention to stereotypical tropes about Africa, we also consider how museum representations are changing and how some new works are creating complex, challenging ways of understanding African identities. Taught by Monique Scott.