Lehrende/r: Dr. Pia Wiegmink
Veranstaltungsart: Übung
Anzeige im Stundenplan: Cultural Studies IV
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 45
Anmeldegruppe: CS IV AS
Prioritätsschema: Senatsrichtlinie Zulassung gemäß Richtlinie über den Zugang zu teilnahmebeschränkten Lehrveranstaltungen vom 07. März 2007. Nähere Informationen hierzu entnehmen Sie bitte www.info.jogustine.uni-mainz.de/senatsrichtlinie
Inhalt: This seminar will examine legal, political, and cultural concepts that defined race relations in the U.S. in the past and still continues to impact ideas relating to interracialism today. As early as 1662, the colony of Virginia passed a law that punished marriages of black males and white females. During slavery, white masters often raped their black female slaves but since the child follows the condition of the mother, these mixed-raced children became slaves of their white fathers/masters. At the turn of the twentieth century, clear-cut and irreconcilable binary conceptions of race justified many lynchings as the protection white women from the "bestial" black rapist. It has only been since 1967 with the U.S. Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision that interracial marriage became legal throughout the US. When put in an international perspective, laws like the "one drop rule" and social phenomena like passing (for white) draw attention to the fact that white America's preoccupation with miscegenation and the fear of blurring of racial boundaries are almost unique U.S. phenomena. In this seminar we will research famous court cases and their media reports (such as Pace v. Alabama, 1883, the Rhinelander case, 1925, or Loving v. Virginia, 1967). We will look at famous incidents of black and white relationships (such as Thomas Jefferson's relation to his slave Sally Hemings) and we will examine literary tropes such as the "tragic mulatto," passing, and interracial love. In addition to court documents and newspaper articles, we will thus deal with short stories, poems, autobiographical accounts as well as documentaries and movies that include works by William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Francis E. W. Harper, Fannie Hurst, Langston Hughes, Philip Roth, Barack Obama and others.
