From the Princeton Weekly Bulletin, November 10, 1997
"Integration now!"
American Studies Program incorporates comparative approach to ethnic studies
By Justin Harmon
"Integration now!" quips Sean Wilentz, director of American Studies, when asked to describe Princeton's plans for the future of the program.
The old civil rights slogan describes a direction formally articulated in 1994, when a faculty-student Committee on Diversity and Liberal Education recommended that Princeton address burgeoning interest in ethnic studies by fundamentally redesigning its existing framework for the study of American culture and society "to encompass studies of the comparative experience of the peoples of America, broadly defined."
Three years later, Wilentz and his faculty colleagues in the Program in American Studies have created a new "flagship" course meant to elicit the interest of freshmen and sophomores in the intellectual questions posed by this comparative perspective, revamped the core course and established a host of new advanced courses that cross disciplinary boundaries. Meanwhile, Princeton has attracted faculty with particular expertise in Asian American and Latino studies. Conferences and other special events sponsored by American Studies have helped foster interest in these issues on campus and beyond.
"An ethnic or racial approach, narrowly conceived, does not do justice to the numerous ethnic and racial components of American culture," wrote Wilentz in an opinion column in The Chronicle of Higher Education in November 1996. "Although ethnicity is a basic feature of American life, its various incarnations cry out for comparative study. And although the United States may not be a melting pot, neither its culture nor that of its ethnic groups is pristine. To paraphrase the writer Ralph Ellison, Americans are all 'cultural mulattos.'"
An Atlantic nation
Dean of the College Nancy Weiss Malkiel, a leader of the Committee on Diversity and Liberal Education, cites Wilentz's course on American Democracy and the Atlantic World as an important intellectual antecedent for the discussion of American studies at Princeton.
With support from a Cotsen Faculty Fellowship, Wilentz designed a course that broke from customary frameworks, which tended to emphasize the United States' unique role in history; instead, he emphasized the idea of the country as an Atlantic nation, one whose relationships to Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa are central to its past and present. The syllabus framed a comparative and cross-regional perspective, "one that starts with the Atlantic world: the economic and political empires, free and coerced labor systems, cultural exchanges and political institutions out of which the United States emerged in the 18th century," and carries on through the political and social transformations of the 19th and 20th centuries.
"This course led the way," says Malkiel, "in that it exemplified Sean's vision for the program, as well as our sense of what is possible in looking at American culture in its multiplicity and in a comparative frame. It put into practice a method for understanding the American experience in its interaction with cultures and societies both within the Caribbean and Latin America and across the ocean."
Wilentz views the new approach as building on and combining with the program's traditional strengths.
"We believe strongly that what the program has been doing all along in the way of examining American history, society and culture is absolutely essential to continue," he said. "We reject any idea that the new must expand at the expense of the old. Without a thorough understanding of what some deride as 'mainstream' American culture, there can be no understanding of America."
Shaping Princeton's new approach has been a collaboration both formal and informal, as faculty have worked together on committees and smaller ad hoc groups to frame the new American Studies curriculum. The work of the Committee on Diversity and Liberal Education was followed by a Task Force on Diversity and the Curriculum, led by Professor of Religion Albert Raboteau, which took the general recommendations of the committee and sought to make them more particular in light of existing programs and courses. Much of the subsequent work on curriculum development was supported through grants from the Raboteau task force, as well as from the President's 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education.
American Classics
Malkiel, Wilentz, Raboteau and Professor of Religion David Carrasco formed the core of a group focused on developing American Studies' new flagship course. Professor of English William Howarth and professors of history Daniel Rodgers and Christine Stansell joined in the discussion. In the end, Raboteau and Carrasco took responsibility for mounting the new AMS 103, which they have called American Classics.
"The idea was to create a course that would not be mandatory but would attract significant numbers of students, particularly freshmen and sophomores," said Raboteau. Added Malkiel, "We were looking for a high-profile way of introducing students to these enormously important and interesting themes in such a way as to make them feel, 'That's a course I have to take.'"
They organized the course around certain historical and literary texts that they believed to be American classics. "By 'classics,' we meant texts that were historically specific but opened out onto wider perspectives on some major themes that have characterized the American experience," said Raboteau. This semester, Raboteau and Carrasco are team-teaching the course to 120 undergraduates in two lectures and one preceptorial per week; the professors take turns lecturing, and each may offer reflections or commentary at the end of the other's lecture.
Among the themes and texts:
- the encounter of people of divergent backgrounds, using Miguel Leon's Broken Spears, which describes the Aztec experience of their encounter with the Spanish, as well as selections from Bernal Diaz del Castillo's The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, which tells the same story from the opposite perspective;
- freedom and its opposites (W.E.B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, The Declaration of Independence, and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address);
- community and identity (Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'n-head Wilson);
- community and memory (Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude);
- the experience of place (Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony , William Faulkner's "The Bear" and Carrasco's essay "Desire and the Frontier");
- social invisibility (Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man); and
- the need to reclaim the past, as an individual and as a member of a group within the society (Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior and Raboteau's essay "A Fire in the Bones").
Carrasco draws on source materials and artifacts from his Mesoamerican Archive; Raboteau, on documents related to his ongoing work on a 13-volume history of African Americans and their religious culture.
American Places
The old AMS 201-202 sequence was a two-semester chronology that surveyed important events and broad themes in United States history and culture. Students tended to take only the semester that focused on the more recent past. So, when the faculty, including Wilentz, Howarth, Rodgers and Assistant Professor of English William Gleason, sat down to design a course that framed a broader view of the history and cultures of the Americas, they sought to construct "a one-term course that cut across 500-plus years of recorded American history, and we also wanted to give ample attention to the various Native and European peoples who produced that history," said Howarth.
"There's considerable debate in and out of American studies about whether the concept of 'America' is too confining," he continued. "Some say the rubric is bound up in an ideology that insists people acquire a new identity. Rather than envision America as a cultural melting pot, I suggested using American places as a means of locating and exploring our many cultural traditions."
Thus, the new AMS 201 -- called American Places -- follows a model that is both chronological and spatial. "We don't focus just on cultures, but also on the physical locations in which episodes are played out," says Howarth. "We start in the 17th century in the Southwest. We spend some time on physical geography in the Sonoran desert, looking at its topography and climate and how they affected the Pueblo and Spanish cultures that clashed there. Thus, in addition to the techniques of social history and cultural studies, our methods combine those of historical geography -- a traditional discipline -- and environmental history, a relatively new field."
The principal locations treated in the course include Santa Fe in 1680, Concord in 1775, Gettysburg in 1863, Chicago in 1893, Route 66 in 1935 and Edge City in 1997 -- the last a metaphor for both metro city and suburb. "Each place bears a date that is a moment of historical crisis," Howarth explains. "Our readings enable us to look on either side of the moment; its date is an epicenter produced by the physical and social environments of the place."
The course is organized as one lecture and two precepts per week, led by Howarth, along with Sarah Igo, a third-year graduate student in history, and Patrick O'Kelley, a lecturer in English. At the second precept in any given week, a student helps lead the discussion. Classmates respond to the week's reading via e-mail, with copies to all the members of the precept, and these comments help frame the class discussion. The 60 undergraduates taking the course will also prepare research papers on an American place of their choice, using library and Internet resources. "The students are very excited about their paper topics, which range from Ellis Island to California's missions," Howarth says.
After this semester's experience with the new AMS 201, the course plan will be refined and a proposal made to the faculty Course of Study Committee for its formal adoption as American Studies' core course.
Advanced courses
Howarth's course Race and Region is another touchstone in the development of the new approach to American studies at Princeton. Like AMS 201, this course links the study of important social issues with the study of place. "Racist ideology is often a function of spatial organization," says Howarth. "Where people are physically located, where they are forced to move--plantations, reservations, ghettos--says a lot about how they are viewed by others in the society."
When Howarth first offered Race and Region last spring, he focused the course on the experiences of Native American and African American people; the next time he offers the class at the undergraduate level, he hopes to apply the same approach to Asian American and Latino writings and history. Howarth's Internet home page contains a complete record of the course as offered last spring, including syllabus, texts of lectures and students' notes on class discussions.
Among the other courses in American Studies that exemplify the new curricular approach are a few offered by visitors. Phil Schaap's Jazz in American Society treats a particularly American musical form in order to address historical questions ranging from the legacy of Reconstruction to the urban mood of the 1960s. Kendall Thomas's Law and the Politics of Race examines recent scholarship on American legal institutions and the ideology and politics of race. Ronald Schatz's American Jewry since the 1890s both focuses on the particular social history of Jews in America and emphasizes the problems surrounding Jewish integration into American life.
Princeton's own faculty have made pivotal contributions. Professor of History James McPherson's American Studies seminar, Literature of Sectional Conflict and the Civil War, treats fictional and autobiographical writings. P. Adams Sitney's The American Cinema and Emily Martin's Health and Medicine in American Life bridge American Studies with the History Department, Visual Arts Program and Anthropology Department. Beyond American Studies, Miguel Centeno's The Sociology of Latinos in the United States and two new courses on Asian American literature by Jeff Nunokawa of the English Department typify efforts to address studies of comparative American cultures within the various academic departments.
New faculty
Four key faculty appointments will strengthen Princeton's offerings on ethnicity, immigration and related subjects. The arrival of Alejandro Portes as professor of sociology and Marta Tienda as professor of sociology and public affairs "now make Princeton the preeminent place to study immigration and ethnicity, particularly in relation to the experience of Latinos in the United States," said Malkiel.
Richard Turits, a new assistant professor in the History Department, specializes in the Caribbean region; he has written extensively on agrarian reform and authoritarian government in modern Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. Kyeyoung Park, who will join Anthropology and American Studies in fall 1998, is an ethnographer specializing in the study of Asian American urban communities. Her first book focused on Koreans and Korean American shopkeepers in New York City; her next book studies black-Korean relations in Los Angeles.
Special events
American Studies has hosted a number of conferences and special events in order to help foster interest in its approach to the field on campus and beyond.
In connection with the University's 250th Anniversary, American Studies cosponsored a one-day conference on "Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the University: The Princeton Experience" with African American Studies and Sociology. This program also marked the publication of two volumes based on earlier conferences: The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, edited by Wahneema Lubiano, and Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections, edited by Lewis Dabney.
This past summer, at the initiative of the U.S. Information Agency, the program coordinated an institute for mid-level ministry officials from 18 countries, designed as an introduction to contemporary issues in American cultural and political life.
Looking forward, the new Anschutz Distinguished Fellowship in American Studies, created through an endowment by the Anschutz family, will enable a prominent visitor to spend a semester in residence at Princeton, starting with the 1998-99 academic year. The fellow will teach an undergraduate seminar and deliver a public lecture.
Meanwhile, Wilentz savors the prospect of contributing to the national debate about the best approaches to ethnic and American studies. At its annual conference in October, the American Studies Association debated the question, stimulated in part by Wilentz's opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
And he hopes to continue to forge links with other academic units at Princeton. "One of the fruits of this approach has been the recognition by many of us that we have a lot in common, that we can interact more than we did in the past," he said.
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