Class Syllabus

SEPT. 10: Introduction: Literary Studies, American Exceptionalism, and Its Discontents

PART I: U.S. LITERATURE OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC

SEPT. 17: New World Slavery and The Culture of the Sea

• Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” Billy Budd
• Wai Chee Dimock, “Nation, Self, and Personification”
• John Carlos Rowe, “Melville’s Typee: U.S. Imperialism at Home and Abroad”

SEPT 24: New World Slavery and Literature of the Black Atlantic

• Martin Delaney, Blake (1859)
• Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as Counterculture of Modernity” and “Masters,
• Mistresses, Slaves, and the Antinomies of Modernity”
• Eric Sundquist, “Melville, Delaney, and New World Slavery”

OCT. 1: Caribbean and African American Connections

• Toni Morrison, Tar Baby
• Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”
• Carol Boyce Davies, “Migratory Subjectivities”

OCT. 8: Hemispheric Subjectivities: The Local and the Global

• Russell Banks, Continental Drift
• Michael Dash, “Caribbean Overtures” and “Epilogue: The Final Frontier”
• Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference” and “The Production of Locality”

PART II: LITERARY COSMOPOLITANISM

OCT. 15: Americans Abroad

• Henry James, Daisy Miller
• Amanda Anderson, Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity”
• Scott L. Malcomson, “The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience”
• Martha Nussbaum, “For Love of Country”
• Bruce Robbins, “Root, Root, Root: Martha Nussbaum Meets the Home Team”

OCT. 22: Americans Abroad, II

• James Baldwin, Another Country
• Ross Posnock, “The Agon Black Intellectual: Baldwin and Baraka”

OCT 26: Book Review due.See Adams and Halberstam model reviews

OCT. 29: Post-Colonial Cosmopolitanism

• Bharati Mukherjee, Holder of the World
• Timothy Brennan, “Claims to Global Culture” and “Cosmopolitanism and the Explorer’s Eye”
• Bruce Robbins , “Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism” and “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms”

PART III: DIASPORA AND TRANSNATIONALISM

DATE TBA: Diaspora and Immigrant Literature

• Abraham Cahan, Yekel
• Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America”
• Jon Stratton, “(Dis)placing the Jews: Historicizing the Idea of Diaspora”

NOV. 12: Transnational Communities and the Sea

• Claude McKay, Banjo and “A Negro Writer to His Critics”
• James Clifford, “Diasporas”
• Winston James, “Coming at Midnight” and “The Caribbean and the United States”

NOV. 19: Transnationalism and The Pacific Rim

• Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men
• Sau-ling C. Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered”
• Jenny Sharpe, “Is the United States Post-Colonial?”

DEC. 26: Writing the Americas, I

• Michael Ondaatje, In the Lion’s Skin
• Linda Hutcheon, “Introduction” and “Postmodern Challenge to Boundaries”

DEC. 3: Writing the Americas, II

• Junot Diaz, Drown
• Jose David Saldivar, “The Dialectics of Our America” and “Afterward:
• Postcolonial Borders, Dissent, and the Politics of the Possible”
• Iain Chambers, “An Impossible Homecoming” and “Migrant Landscapes”

PART IV: IN THE CLASSROOM

DEC. 10: In the classroom

• Peter Carafiol, “Commentary: After American Literature”
• Jane C. Desmond and Virginia Dominguez, “Resituating American Studies in a
• Critical Internationalism”
• Gregory Jay, “The End of ‘American’ Literature”
• Carolyn Porter, “What We Know that We Don’t Know”
• Rowe, “Post-Nationalist, Globalism, and the New American Studies”
• George J. Sanchez, “Creating the Multicultural Nation”