This course is designed primarily to allow faculty to develop focused interdisciplinary courses that address specific issues, themes, or problems in American society and American cultures. Topics vary from semester to semester.

During the summer of 2020, public confrontations over the memory of Christopher Columbus re-emerged, as they have ever since his earliest public commemorations in the US began in 1792. Like confederate monuments, during the mass uprisings of 2020, Columbus statues became sites of fierce local contestations across this country. To name just two of several: in Philadelphia, PA, some Italian American ‘defenders’ of Columbus squared off with protestors marching in solidarity with BLM and the Indigenous communities that were decimated as a direct result of what Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot has called Columbus’fateful ‘stumb[ling] on the Bahamas’ in 1492. In Richmond, VA, once capital of the Confederacy, protestors toppled a statue of Columbus into a lake in Byrd Park. While these events may appear to observers as yet another instance of two competing visions of American history (one ‘top-down,’ white and Eurocentric, another ‘bottom-up,’ non-white and inclusive), the figure of Columbus in the US contains a much more layered and ambivalent history, which serves as an excellent case study in how the past is a concept that is inseparable from the present. This course thus takes up the figure of Columbus in order to explore to what degree what we consider past (as individuals, as collectivities) is by no means an inert set of ‘facts’ located ‘out there’ waiting to be ‘discovered.’ As the most recent round of monument debates attest, despite his never having set foot here, the myth of Columbus is alive and well in the US. This course considers Columbus less as an historical personage (be he genocidal villain or heroic explorer) than as a multiple and contradictory site of meaning that is deeply entangled with histories of ethnic and racial identity formation in the US (and beyond). Rather than a comprehensive history of the man and his deeds, we will take up a selection of the many powerful myths and contestations over meaning he has generated. To name just a few such myths and contestations: the idea of the ‘discovery’ of ‘New World,’ Columbus as a symbol of Italian American and/or Catholic identity, and/or Columbus as a perpetrator of indigenous genocide, or his arrival in the Caribbean as a key turning point in the development of transatlantic slavery. As historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor recently put it, “You don’t get to 1619 without 1492.”

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