Lehrende/r: Dr. Pia Wiegmink
Veranstaltungsart: Übung
Anzeige im Stundenplan: 05.866.132
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 45
Anmeldegruppe: AS 132
Inhalt: A few of years before the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Michelle Alexander provided a shocking observation in her New York Times bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010): “More African American adults are under correctional control today – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.” Taking its cue from Alexander’s observation, this seminar will examine legal, political, and cultural concepts that have defined race in the U.S. in the past, and explores how these concepts continue to impact race relations and African American racial identity in contemporary U.S. culture and politics. 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 followed 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 with the protection white women from the “bestial” black rapists. It has only been since 1967 following the U.S. Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia decision that interracial marriage has become legal throughout the US. When put in an international perspective, legal principles for racial classification 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 the Rhinelander case, 1925, or Loving v. Virginia, 1967, People v. OJ Simpson, 1994, State of Florida v. George Zimmerman, 2012). We will look at famous historical incidents of black and white relationships (such as Thomas Jefferson’s relation to his slave Sally Hemings), and we will examine contemporary autobiographies addressing the coming to terms with multiracial identity from a trans/national perspective (such as Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, 1995 and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, 2016). In addition, we will examine fiction which features literary tropes such as the “tragic mulatto,” passing, and interracial love. From October 26-28, 2017, the conference “From Abolition to Black Lives Matter: Past and Present Forms of Transnational Black Resistance” will take place at the JGU. Students who are enrolled in the course are expected to attend at least one panel of the conference as part of their “active participation” (aktive Teilnahme) for this course. A reader with all required reading will be made available to students in the first session.
