This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. We will explore how Black activists and artists from the US have partnered with people of color in Latin America and the Caribbean to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.

As articulated by Thelma Golden, postBlack refers to the work of African American artists who emerged in the 1990s with ambitious, irreverent, and sassy work. PostBlack suggests the emergence of a generation of artists removed from the long tradition of black affirmation of the Harlem Renaissance, Black empowerment of the Black Arts movement, and identity politics of the 1980s and early 90s. This seminar involves critical and theoretical readings on multiculturalism, race, identity, and contemporary art, and will provide an opportunity for a deep engagement with the work of African American artists of the past decade.

This course engages critically with the artifacts and archives of contemporary American culture, inviting students to view, read, and create these artifacts with an eye toward what they tell us about how the United States represents itself and its citizens through various genres including theatre, musicals, film, TV, music, graphic and written novels, games, and the internet. Who are the heroes and villains in contemporary U.S. pop culture? How are family, work, and romance represented across races, genders and sexualities? How are economics and social class portrayed? Do the narratives we consume still promise an American Dream?

Why did three American genres become classics in the same twenty-year period, 1936-1956? Part of the answer lies in global disruptions that unsettled codes of behavior. Part lies in film innovations that altered cinema itself. But more than this intersection of social and formal transformations, the decisive answer lies in a handful of directors who reconfigured gendered relations in three generic forms. The surprising correspondences that emerge among these classic films, if also the obvious divergences even within single genres, that will focus our discussion.

What is American Islam and who are U.S. Muslims? This seminar employs lectures, discussions, and a diverse array of texts, including novels, scholarly works, films, arts, music, and much more, to respond to this question, revealing how a focus on Islam and Muslims in the U.S. produces critical counter-narratives of race, religion, and gender in the United States from the colonial era to the present.

Democracy in the United States is looking a bit rickety. Decades of progress in voting rights are countered by recent efforts to weaken the connection between popular opinion and representational outcomes. This course will address redistricting, the process of redrawing legislative and congressional lines, which every state will do in 2021. Redistricting can remedy a distorted Census count - or make its effects tenfold worse. We will address how lines can be drawn to enhance fairness and the representation of diverse communities. As case studies we may redistrict Texas, North Carolina, Michigan, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Short stories have been used by writers to make concise, insightful comments about American national identity and individuality. Taken up by African-Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and many others, the genre has been used to convey experiences with immigration and assimilation, discrimination and oppression, generational divides, and interactions across difference. Examination of such stories deepens our understanding of America's multiethnic landscape. In this seminar, we will explore stories written by a diverse group of writers to consider the ties that both link and divide multiethnic America.

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the history and evolution of the Walt Disney Company not only as a multinational media and entertainment conglomerate but also as a powerful cultural force--from the early films and theme parks to the recently launched streaming service. We'll consider the ever-expanding Disney multiverse (which now includes Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, among others) as well as the company's global reach, while paying special attention to its impacts on, and representations of, American history, society, and culture, particularly as they touch on matters of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and place.

This class aims to explore transnational issues in policing. Drawing heavily upon anthropological methods and theory, we aim neither to vindicate nor contest the police's right to use force (whether a particular instance was a violation of law), but instead, to contribute to the understanding of force (its forms, justifications, interpretations). The innovative transnational approach to policing developed during the semester will allow for a cross-cultural comparative analysis that explores larger rubrics of policing in a comprehensive social scientific framework. We hope that you are ready to explore these exciting and urgent issues with us.

This course will introduce students to the comparative study of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We will take a broad hemispheric approach instead of focusing solely on the experiences of any particular native community, allowing students to both acquaint themselves with the diversity of indigenous communities and better understand the multitude of indigenous experiences--or, what it means to be indigenous--across regional contexts. How do processes of imperial expansionism and settler colonialisms shape the conditions within which indigenous Americans now live? How do native peoples relate to settler colonial governing bodies today?

In cooperation with the Sundance and the Berlin Film Festivals, our workshop will investigate the crisis of film production, distribution and canonization made acute by the Pandemic as well as divisive culture wars. We will uncover how the formation of film canons is informed by the ebb and flow of the civil rights movement. Our focus will be on stories of injustice filmed by women and Afro-American artists. The seminar work will consist of making short digital presentations and scholarly film-montage essays. The class will record Zoom interviews with critically acclaimed filmmakers, film festival directors and leaders of the film industry.

Performance and crisis have always been partners: entangled in epidemics, state violence and resistance, and austerity regimes, as well as the crisis ordinariness of settler colonialism and structural racism. This seminar examines performance in our extraordinary present using autoethnography, ethnography, and interviews. Course readings and viewings offer historical and contemporary case studies. Guests will discuss the paired challenges of antiracism and the COVID-19 pandemic for performance organizations. Students will collaborate on analyses of dance and performance organizations' responses to COVID-19 and anti-racist imperatives.

What can memoirs teach us about navigating the demands of a life in dance, and about the ways these demands are profoundly intersectional: shaped by racial, gender, and class hierarchies and economies? This seminar examines memoir as an activist project and mode of performance illuminating the work of dance. Readings include works by Carlos Acosta, Misty Copeland, Li Cunxin, Mark Morris, Jock Soto, and others. Theories of personal narrative theory and autobiography guide our discussions. Students will conduct oral history interviews and investigate personal papers in local archives as forms of memoir. Emphasis on dancers in the Americas.

This course studies the entanglement between ideas of personhood and the history of ideas about beauty. How does beauty make and unmake persons -socially, legally and culturally- at the intersection of race, gender and aesthetics? Let us move beyond the good versus bad binary that dominates discussions of beauty to focus instead on how beauty in literature and culture have contributed to the conceptualization of modern, western personhood and its inverse (the inhuman, the inanimate, the object). We will trace beauty and its disruptions in the arenas of literature, visual culture, global capitalism, politics, law, science and technology.

This course will look to the many narratives and histories that comprise the multiple worlds of Latinx Literatures. How does the term Latinx respond to questions of gender and language? What does the history of naming this pan-ethnic group tell us about U.S. racial-ethnic categories? How do borders become an occasion to rethink space and psyche, as well as entangled crisis? Taking a hemispheric approach, this course will examine how Latinx texts lend imagination and poetic vision to the experience of migration, the movements of diaspora, and the lasting effects of colonization.

Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor notes the word "indian" is a "colonial enactment" that "has no referent in tribal languages or cultures." But as a trope it has long provided Western culture with a vision of romantic primitivism, of savage cruelty, or of the doomed victims of colonial expansion. This course will examine eighteenth-century transatlantic representations of North American Indigenous people and consider the cultural functions of these representations and their role in settler colonialism. In addition to literary texts, we will also examine art and visual culture, collected objects, and philosophical writing from the period.

The Caribbean is an archipelago made up of islands that both link and separate the Americas - islands that have weathered various waves of colonization, migration, and revolution. How do narratives of the Caribbean represent the collision of political forces and natural environments? Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, we will explore questions of indigeneity, colonial contact, iterations of enslavement, and the plantation matrix in literary texts. How do island-writers evoke gender and a poetics of relation that exceeds tourist desire and forceful extraction?

How do we analyze conspiracy narratives and conspiratorial thinking at a moment when the government spies on its citizens and profitable technology companies have turned surveillance itself into an economic necessity? Under what historical, political, and economic conditions do conspiracies proliferate? In this course we analyze conspiracies, paranoia, rumors, and the contemporary economies of dis/information and post-facts. Course material will be drawn from American history, from the 19th century to the present, and will include manifestos, films, novels, online fora, and theoretical texts in psychoanalysis, narrative theory and politics.

This course explores the fascination with animals in film, photography and popular culture, engaging critical issues in animal and environmental studies. In the context of global crises of climate change and mass displacement, course themes include the invention of wilderness, national parks, zoos and the prison system; the cult of the pet; vampires, werewolves and liminal creatures; animal communication, emotions and rights; queering nature; race and strategies for environmental justice. How can rethinking animals help us rethink what it means to be human? How can we transform our relations with other species and the planet itself?

Multi-disciplinary seminar focused on communicating climate science in the context of digital culture, with a specific focus on American journalism and social media. Course addresses a range of media - including documentary, the op-ed, data visualization, immersive storytelling, and virtual and augmented reality. Further considers the media culture and narrative strategies of communities leading movements for climate justice. Through individual and collaborative assignments, students test out different forms of science communication and experiment with crafting multimedia environmental stories informed by their research for public audiences.

Pleasure Power and Profit explores the intimate ways that sexualities and race are entwined in contemporary culture, historically, and in our own lives. Why are questions about sexuality and race some of the most controversial, compelling, yet often taboo issues of our time? Exploring films, popular culture, novels, social media, and theory, we engage themes like: race, gender and empire; fetishism, Barbie, vampires and zombies; sex work and pornography; marriage and monogamy; queer sexualities; and strategies for social empowerment such as: Black Lives Matter, the new campus feminism, and global movements against sexual and gender violence.

This course engages theoretical and empirical work about interest groups and social movements in U.S. politics and policy-making. We examine theories of interest group and social movement formation, maintenance, and decline; how interest groups and social movements try to (& do) influence politics and public policy; interactions between interest groups and the three branches of the federal government; lobbying, elections, and campaign finance; and the effectiveness of interest groups and movements as agents of democratic representation, particularly for marginalized groups such as women, people of colour, low-income people, and LGBTQ people.

This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese Exclusion, Japanese internment, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.

This course explores histories of race, labor, and empire in the United States from Late 19th century to the present from a transnational perspective. In doing so, we will examine the history of race as a product of modernity and colonization. By the end of this course, students will have a keen understanding of how racial constructions (in intersection with gender, sexuality, and class) are deeply intertwined with histories of empire, labor, and immigration. Yet, we will also discuss how groups have resisted, survived, and thrived. We will engage a wide range of sources including legal documents, court rulings, newspapers, and literature.

Working with Princeton's Western Americana collections, students will explore what archives are and how they are made. Who controls what's in them? How do they shape what historians write? Using little studied collections, students will produce online "exhibitions" for the Library website, and research potential acquisitions for the Library collections. Significant time will be devoted to in-class workshops focused on manuscript and visual materials (all digitized for the class). Special visitors will include curators, archivists, librarians, and dealers.

The Reconstruction of the Union, following the American Civil War, remade the United States. This course will examine how Reconstruction set the stage for rest of the Nineteenth century in all its contradictions. One big theme for the course is how the Civil War and Reconstruction shaped American political philosophy, especially how later debates of the Progressive Era over the size of the government and over laissez-faire capitalism developed out of Reconstruction. We will examine some of the major Constitutional and political changes that occur during the aftermath of the Civil War.

The prison is a growth industry in the U.S.; it is also a central institution in U.S. political and social life, shaping our experience of race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and political possibility. This course explores the history of incarceration over the course of more than two centuries. It tracks the emergence of the penitentiary in the early national period and investigates mass incarceration of the late 20th century. Topics include the relationship between the penitentiary and slavery; the prisoners' rights movement; Japanese internment; immigration detention; and the privatization and globalization of prisons.

This course considers the history of collective violence in America. We will define "collective violence" broadly to encompass people acting on behalf of the U.S. government (i.e., police, soldiers, militiamen, and immigration officers) and people acting as civilians (i.e., slaveholders, vigilantes, terrorists, and protestors). A series of case studies (drawn primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries) will introduce disparate forms of violence, including vigilantism, slavery, massacre, imperialism, riot, segregation, and terrorism.

This seminar explores how the historical image of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) has been developed in American memory through writing, film and literature. Issues to be examined are the major groups of biographical interpreters (the "personal life," the "Progressive Lincoln," the "Liberal Hero"), the portrayals of Lincoln in literature (Whitman, Vidal), and how concepts of Lincoln have been shaped by film (Spielberg's Lincoln, 2012) and television episodes (The Twilight Zone, Star Trek).

This is an introductory survey of critical topics, themes, and approaches to the interdisciplinary field of Latin@x Studies. Drawing from anthropology, sociology, history, literature, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, this course will analyze the role and position of Latin@x in the United States alongside the policies and practices of the US in the Caribbean and Latin America. The course will explore questions of citizenship, immigration, imperialism, settler/colonialism, border crossing/borderlands, mass incarceration, policing, globalization, and other emerging formations of latinidad from a transnational perspective.

This course begins from the disjoint and relation between the narrated autobiography and the lived life. In reading works by authors including Myriam Gurba, Wendy C. Ortiz, Carmen Maria Machado, Richard Rodriguez, and Junot Diaz, we will explore not only how writers experiment with the project of narrating a life that contends with the structures and strictures of racial matrices, gender binaries, and traumatic abuse - but also how writers test the boundaries of what autobiographies more generally are and are for.

In this seminar we examine the tangled and shifting relationship between religion and race in American history. In doing so, we explore a broad landscape of racial construction, identity, and experience and consider such topics as American interpretations of race in the Bible, religion and racial slavery, race and missions, religion, race, and science, popular culture representations of racialized religion, and religiously-grounded resistance to racial hierarchy.

This seminar uses the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality to help students understand undergraduate life at Princeton. We will make sense of how the experiences you have had over the past four years are strongly influenced by historical, cultural, social, and technological forces. The aim is to develop a sociological understanding of the Princeton experience, and use that to reflect more generally on the organization of communities. Topics covered include Sports, Town-Gown relationships, Nightlife, Academics, Sexual Assault, Eating Clubs, Admissions, Systematic Racism, the concepts of merit, inclusion, and equality.

For the first time in history, more than half of the world's population lives in cities. By 2030 that figure may rise to 60 percent. Such telluric transformations are taking place amidst (1) global economic integration; (2) rapid climatic and environmental change; and (3) rising levels of migration both internal and across international borders. The course provides a sketch of urban evolution prior to the onset of modernity. It then examine urbanization in the United States and selected locations in Latin America, Europe, and Asia with special attention to spatial reconfigurations, population shifts, and challenges faced by urban dwellers.

As an art form, theater operates in the shared space and time of the present moment while also manifesting imagined worlds untethered by the limits of "real" life. In this course, we undertake a critical, creative and historical survey of the ways contemporary theater-making in the United States - as both industry and creative practice - does (and does not) engage the most urgent concerns of contemporary American society.

Why do some BIPOC dramatists (from the US and Canada) choose to adapt/revise/re-envision/deconstruct/rewrite/appropriate canonical texts from the Western theatrical tradition. While their choices might be accused of recentering and reinforcing "white" narratives that often marginalize and/or exoticize racial and ethnic others, we might also see this risky venture as a useful strategy to write oneself into a tradition that is itself constantly being revised and reevaluated and to claim that tradition as one's own. What are the artistic, cultural, and economic "rewards" for deploying this method of playmaking? What are risks?