English 202-001
Writing in the Humanities: Racial Drafts
Instr: Ponder, Justin
Office: CRT 585; 229-
e-mail: jponder@uwm.edu
Office hours: TBA
Course Information: MW; 12:30-1:45pm; BUS S165
Course Description
This course will explore the difficulties of 1) race, 2) visuals, 3) writing, and 4) writing about the visuals of race. The four inextricably bind throughout our social lives. When we talk about race, we usually mean its visibility, skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and lip size. However, we never experience these visual facts without the written ones about them. Like photograph captions, we do not see racial bodies outside the discourses that teach us what blacks, whites, Asians, and latinos look like. Of course, these depictions often appear like little more than caricatures, casting racial groups in the most racist light and fail to address many whose features lie between these extremes. The writing of race, however, does not fair much better with terms like blacks, whites, Asians, and latinos we throw around everyday failing to deal with the complexities of identities that lie between these terms. Despite the fact that visual and verbal languages of race inevitably fail, when we usually confront visually ambiguous people who violate our hidden stereotypes or encounter situations that disturb our racial categories, we ignore it. When faced with racial ambiguity, we retreat into the flawed visuals and writings of race. We overlook the contradictions and insist we know what race is without ever fully analyzing what it always fails to be. This class will face these moments of racial breakdown, where the meanings at our disposal malfunction. We will do so by writing about the visuals of race in literature, film, television, comics, advertisements, the internet, and theory to interrogate our racial assumptions and the idea of race altogether. Again, this course will explore the difficulties of 1) race, 2) visuals, 3) writing, and 4) writing about the visuals of race. The four are inextricably bound throughout our social lives in largely unexamined ways, but we will scrutinize their complex involvement throughout this course in hopes that we can take deeper understandings out into our lives.
Texts:
Elements of Style (composition book)
"Course in General Linguistics" (article) Ferdinand de Saussure. 76-90.
Race the Floating Signifier (documentary) Stuart Hall
Passing (Novel by Nella Larsen)
Chappelle's Show (Television)
Boondocks (Comic strip)
Pinky (Film)
"Passing for White, Passing for Black" (article) Adrian Piper
"Headhunting on the Internet" (article) Lisa Nakamura
Ethnic Notions: Black People in White Minds. (Documentary) Marlon Riggs.
