Instr:                Gregory Jay,  Professor of English
Office:              CRT 284,     229-6327
e-mail:              gjay@uwm.edu
Office hours:     by appointment.

Course Information:     Wed. 1:30-4:10 pm     Curtin Hall 321

Course Description

This doctoral-level research seminar will provide the opportunity to study the relatively new interdisciplinary field of “whiteness studies.” Built on a long tradition of scholarly and cultural analysis, the field has lately gained prominence through the work of novelist Toni Morrison, historian David Roediger, film scholar Richard Dyer, educator Christine Sleeter, and many others that we will read in the course of the seminar. Whiteness studies scholars investigate how the cultural imagination of “whiteness” functions in our social practices, artistic traditions, and political economy. The seminar will familiarize participants with the competing claims of whiteness studies scholars and ask them to critique these claims. By the end, participants should possess an enhanced understanding of how race, particularly the concept of “whiteness,” is imagined in modern culture, specifically in literary texts, historical study, popular media, and humanities pedagogy. All seminar participants will construct a term-long research project focused on analyzing the construction of whiteness in a particular cultural arena or theoretical debate. Project proposals will be due by the fourth week. Participants will also make oral presentations to the class.

Readings and screenings for the course are yet to be determined, but will probably include an anthology or two on whiteness studies; Jane Lazarre's Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons; Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and a selection of literary works such as Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Passing, and Absalom, Absalom!.