History 2712
RACE, ETHNICITY, AND GENDER
Core Seminar
Department of
History, Fall 2004
Professors Lara
Putnam and Bruce L. Venarde
Lara Putnam
(lep12@pitt.edu , 648-7456),
Office hours M 12:30-2:00
and by appointment
Bruce L. Venarde (bvenarde@pitt.edu,
624-8437),
Office hours TH 11:15-1:00 and by appointment
COURSE DESCRIPTION
How are systems of human inequality structured by claims about individual bodies and collective character? This seminar explores the social construction of race, ethnicity, and gender in international and historical perspective. Each of these three kinds of hierarchical difference joins together a set of ideas about natural and cultural essences that serve to define and justify social boundaries. But how universal are they? And how parallel are they? Do race, ethnicity, and gender exist in all human societies? Have they interacted similarly across time and space? Or are there historical specificities we must recognize in order to avoid anachronistic or culture-bound use of these analytic constructs?
This seminar begins by surveying the evolving theorization of race, ethnicity, and gender among anthropologists, historians, and other scholars over the past three decades. It then goes on to examine a series of in-depth case studies drawn from settings as diverse as early modern China , gold rush California , and twentieth-century Peru. The authors approach the making of race, ethnicity, and gender as grounded social processes that cannot be understood in isolation. These studies, then, locate the practices that create and recreate race, ethnicity, and gender in the context of other historical dynamics that include colonial expansion, urbanization, changing labor systems, and struggles over the boundaries of citizenship in nation-states.
REQUIREMENTS
Participation
As
with any graduate seminar, active participation in class discussions
is essential. Do not enroll for this course if you will be unable
to master the weekly readings and come prepared to discuss them
in detail.
Writing
* Eight
(8) 1-2 page (300-600 word) papers due no later than noon Monday
before the weekly meeting. These will be critical commentaries on
the common reading and will serve to organize discussion and debate.
Papers might take the form of a summary analysis, focus on a specific
aspect of a given book's subject matter, or discuss nitty-gritty
matters (e.g. source use, organization, style). The only strict
guidelines are that the papers demonstrate serious thought about
the work at hand and be written in lucid and mature scholarly prose.
You must write a paper for September 13 th and
write all eight short papers by November 22nd .
*Final paper of 6-8 pages (1,800-2,500 words), due by noon on Monday, December 13 th . Topic: In what ways have scholarly debates over the making of race, ethnicity, and gender been parallel or linked? In what have they differed or diverged? How have scholars utilized these concepts in researching historical processes? And where should we go from here?
Approximate final grade weighting : 50% discussion participation, 50% writing. Except in cases of documented personal emergency, the instructors will not give incompletes for this seminar.
SCHEDULE OF READINGS
September
13 th : Theories
Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Making Gender:
The Politics and Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996),
21-42 (originally published in Feminist Studies vol. 1, no.
2 [1972]: 5-31) plus 1996 remarks in Making Gender, 215-16
John L. Comaroff, "Of Totemism and Ethnicity: Consciousness, Practice, and the Signs of Inequality," in John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 49-67 (originally published in Ethnos 52 (1987): 301-23)
Barbara
J. Fields, "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United
States of America," New Left Review
181 (1990): 95-118
Nancy A. Hewitt, "Compounding Differences," Feminist Studies
18, no. 2 (1992): 313-326
Verena Stolcke, "Is Sex to Gender as Race is to Ethnicity?," in Gendered Anthropology, ed. Teresa del Valle (London: Routledge,
1993), 17-37
Katherine Verdery, "Ethnicity,
Nationalism, and State-Making: Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: Past
and Future," in The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond "Ethnic
Groups and Boundaries," ed. H. Vermeulen and C. Govers (Amsterdam:
Spinhaus, 1994), 33-58
Sherry B. Ortner, "So, Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in Making Gender: 173-180, notes 234-235.
Viranjini Munasinghe, "Culture Creators and Culture Bearers: The Interface Between Race and Ethnicity in Trinidad," Transforming Anthropology 6, nos. 1-2 (1997): 72-86
Nancy Leys Stepan, "Race, Gender, Science and Citizenship," Gender and History 10, no. 1 (1998): 26-52
Rogers Brubaker and Frederick J. Cooper, "Beyond Identity," Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1-47
Barbara J. Fields, "Of Rogues and Geldings," American Historical Review vol. 108, no. 5 (2003): 1397-1405
September 20th
James
Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community
in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel
Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
September 27th
Laura
Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise : Ethnography and Cartography
in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001)
James Millward, "A Uyghur Muslim in Qianlong's Court: The Meaning of the Fragrant Concubine," Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 2 (1994): 427-58
October 4th
Kathleen
Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the
Eighteenth Century (New York : Routledge, 2003)
October 11th
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness
of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1998)
October 18th
Susan
Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California
Gold Rush (New York : W. W. Norton, 2000)
October 25th
Ann
Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the
Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002)
November 1st
Eileen
J. Suárez Findlay, Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality
and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1999)
November 8th
Glenda
E. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White
Supremacy in North Carolina,
1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1996)
November 15th
George
Chauncey, Gay New York : Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making
of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York; Basic Books, 1994)
November 22nd
Marisol
de la Cadena, Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture
in Peru (Durham: Duke University Press,
2000)
Dru Gladney, "Representing Nationality in China : Refiguring Majority/Minority Identities," Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (1994): 92-123
November 29th
Ruth Roach Pierson and Nupur
Chaudhuri, eds., Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender
and Race (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)
December
6th
Pierre
Bourdieu, Masculine Domination (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001)
***Final paper due at noon on Monday, December 13 th ***
