In this course, students investigate the way literature and other art forms have both represented the diversity of the United States and shaped conceptions of diversity. English 166AC provides students with an opportunity to deepen and complicate their appreciation of the way fictions make meaning, shape our understanding and experience of the world, and transform society. Topics vary from term to term and might focus on a form (e.g. "Race and Ethnicity in American Cinema"), a literary historical period (e.g. "Race and Revision in Early America"), or a concept (e.g. nationhood in "Literatures of the Asian Diaspora in America").

This course considers the intertwined histories of capitalism and racism in the United States. Recent years have seen a resurgent interest in the work of revolutionary thinkers—such as Karl Marx, W.E.B. DuBois, Grace Lee Boggs, Angela Davis, and Sylvia Federici— while contemporary radical scholars such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Tithi Bhattacharya and Vijay Prashad have come to the fore. Together they, among other thinkers, can be seen to be advancing the study of what Cedric Robinson has called “racial capitalism.” Since Marx first conceptualized the rise of industrial capitalism on the basis of England as its classic case, New World colonization and the US’s empire of cotton have increasingly come to be understood as an integral part of the story of global capital accumulation. Just as the enclosure of the European commons and indigenous dispossession in the New World went hand in hand, so too did the transAtlantic slave trade and the transPacific coolie trade in the Americas, racialized debt peonage in the US South and racially segmented migrant labor markets in the US West. American society’s multiple, diverse racial and ethnic cultures are embedded within a fully global political economy of modern capitalism. Thus, conceptually whereas an earlier generation of radical academics may have asked if liberation is to be found in a working-class revolution or in an uprising of the “wretched of the earth,” the concept of racial capitalism offers an ongoing synthesis by refusing to accept the antinomy of racial versus class formations, setting out instead their dynamic interrelation. The concept of racial capitalism entails the grounds for its abolition. Therefore alongside the history of the interrelation between Black and Asian American racial formation and white working class formation, the course will also cover examples of a multiracial Left resistance to racial capitalism. As a course in the critical theory of race and class, the course represents a conceptual exploration of the meeting ground between Marxism, the Black Radical Tradition, and the Asian American Movement. As such it also represents a recovery and appreciation of the 1960s period of Afro-Asian solidarity politics that formed the intellectual origins of Ethnic Studies.

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Requirements class fulfills