Professors Taylor (English), Kessler (Political Science), Creighton (History; chair), Bruce (Religion), and Kane (Sociology); Associate Professors Fra-Molinero (Spanish), Eames (Anthropology), Nero (Rhetoric), Carnegie (Anthropology), Hill (Political Science), Jensen (History), McClendon (African American Studies and American Cultural Studies), and Houchins (African American Studies); Assistant Professor Smith (Education); Lecturer Pope.L (Theater)

American cultural studies is an interdisciplinary program that seeks to understand the differences and commonalities that inform changing answers to the question: What does it mean to be an American? Courses offering diverse methods and perspectives help to explore how self-conceptions resist static definition, how cultural groups change through interaction, and how disciplines transform themselves through mutual inquiry. The courses in American cultural studies help provide a lens through which to view how groups of Americans see themselves and each other and how American institutions have constructed such differences as race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. Seen as such, the critical study of what it means to be American relies not on fixed, unitary, or absolute values, but rather on dynamic meanings that are themselves a part of cultural history. Respecting diverse claims to truth as changing also allows them to be understood as changeable.

Cross-listed Courses. Note that unless otherwise specified, when a department/program references a course or unit in the department/program, it includes courses and units cross-listed with the department/program.

Major Requirements. The major in American cultural studies requires ten courses in addition to a senior thesis. There are three required courses: an introduction to African American history or African American studies; a course introducing race, ethnicity, and gender as analytical categories; and a course introducing interdisciplinary methods of analysis. Seven courses in addition to the thesis are to be chosen from the list below. These electives should include advanced courses in at least two disciplines and constitute a coherent area of concentration. In addition, one course should study the African diaspora, one course should use gender as a primary category of analysis, and one course should have a fieldwork component. This fieldwork course should involve six to eight hours per week in a community setting, as well as relevant academic work. The selection and sequence of courses must be discussed with the faculty advisor and approved by the fall semester of the junior year. All majors must complete a senior thesis (American Cultural Studies 457 and/or 458).

Pass/Fail Grading Option. There are no restrictions on the use of the pass/fail option within the major.

In addition to specific American cultural studies courses, the following courses from across the curriculum can be applied to the major:

AA/EN 121X. Music and Metaphor: The Sounds in African American Literature.
AAS 140A. Introduction to African American Studies.
AA/RH 162. White Redemption: Cinema and the Co-optation of African American History.
AA/WS 201. African American Women and Feminist Thought.
AA/EN 212. Black Lesbian and Gay Literatures.
AA/TH 225. The Grain of the Black Image.
AA/TH 226. Minority Images in Hollywood Film.
AA/MU 249. African American Popular Music.
AA/AN 251. History, Agency, and Representation in the Making of the Caribbean.
AA/DN 252. Twentieth-Century American Dance II.
AA/WS 266. Gender, Race, and Science.
AA/HI 390E. African Slavery in the Americas.
AA/RH 391C. The Harlem Renaissance.
AA/EN 395Z. African American Literature and the Bible.
AA/MU 399B. Junior-Senior Seminar in Ethnomusicology.
AA/AR s20. Religious Arts of the African Diaspora.
AA/AN s28. Cultural Production and Social Context, Jamaica.

ANTH 101. Social Anthropology.
AN/RE 234. Myth, Folklore, and Popular Culture.
ANTH 322. First Encounters: European "Discovery" and North American Indians.
ANTH 333. Culture and Interpretation.
ANTH 335. The Ethnographer's Craft.
ANTH 347. New World Archeology.
AN/ED 378. Ethnographic Approaches to Education.
ANTH s10. Encountering Community: Ethnographic Fieldwork and Service Learning.
ANTH s20. Refugees and Resettlement.
ANTH s24. Service-Learning in the Local Community.
ANTH s25. Ethnicity, Bilingualism, Religion, and Gender: Topics in Ethnographic Fieldwork.
ANTH s32. Introduction to Archeological Fieldwork.

ART 283. Contemporary Art.
ART 288. Visualizing Race.
ART 361. Museum Internship.
ART 375. Issues of Sexuality and the Study of Visual Culture.
ART 377A. Picturesque Suburbia.
ART s17. Consuming Consumer Culture.
ART s23. Art and Artists in New York.
ART s32. The Photograph as Document.

CMS 285. Democracies and Crisis: Athens and America.

DANC 250. Twentieth-Century American Dance I.
DANC s29A. Dance as a Collaborative Art I.
DANC s29B. Dance as a Collaborative Art II.
DANC s29C. Dance as a Collaborative Art III.

ECON 230. Economics of Women, Men, and Work.
ECON 331. Labor Economics.
ECON 348. Urban Economics.

EDUC 231. Perspectives on Education.
EDUC 240. Gender Issues in Education.
ED/SO 242. Race, Cultural Pluralism, and Equality in American Education.
EDUC 250. Critical Perspective on Pedagogy and Curriculum.
EDUC 350. Anti-Oppressive Education.
ED/SO 380. Education, Reform, and Politics.
EDUC s27. Literacy in the Community.

EN/WS 121G. Asian American Women Writers.
ENG 141. American Writers to 1900.
ENG 152. American Writers since 1900.
ENG 241. American Fiction.
ENG 250. The African American Novel.
ENG 294. Storytelling.
ENG 395B. Dissenting Traditions in Twentieth-Century American Literature.
ENG 395C. Frost, Williams, and Stevens.
ENG 395F. To Light: Five Twentieth-Century American Women Poets.
ENG 395K. African American Literary and Cultural Criticism.
EN/WS 395L. Feminist Literary Criticism.
EN/WS 395S. Asian American Women Writers, Filmmakers, and Critics.
ENG s20. NewsWatch.
ENG s23. Beatniks and Mandarins: A Literary and Cultural History of the American Fifties.
ENG s25. Sociocultural Approaches to Children's Literature.
ENG s28. Robert Creeley and Company.
EN/RH s29. Place, Word, Sound: New Orleans.

FYS 153. Race in American Political and Social Thought.
FYS 187. Hard Times: Economy and Society in the Great Depression.
FYS 221. Medicine and the American Civil War.
FYS 234. The U.S. Relocation Camps in World War II.
FYS 245. Am�rica with an Accent.
FYS 267. American Childhood.
FYS 271. Into the Woods: Rewriting Walden.
FYS 286. Whitelands: Cinematic Nightmares.
FYS 287. Music and Metaphor: The Sounds in African American Literature.
FYS 294. Race and Its Representations.

FRE 240B. "Mon pays, c'est l'hiver": Qu�bec Culture and Literature.
FRE s35. French in Maine.

HIST 140. Origins of the New Nation, 1500-1820.
HIST 141. America in the Age of the Civil War.
HIST 142. America in the Twentieth Century.
HIST 181. Latin American History: From the Conquest to the Present.
HI/WS 210. Technology in United States History.
HIST 243. African American History.
HIST 244. Native American History: Contact to Removal.
HIST 249. Colonial North America.
HIST 261. American Protest in the Twentieth Century.
HIST 265. Wartime Dissent in Modern America.
HI/WS 267. Blood, Genes, and American Culture.
HIST 271. The United States in Vietnam, 1945-1975.
HIST 280. Revolution and Conflict in the Caribbean and Central America.
HIST 288. Environment, Development, and Power in Latin America.
HIST 290. Gender and the Civil War.
HIST 390F. The American West.
HIST 390P. Prelude to the Civil Rights Movement.
HIST 390U. Colony, Nation, and Diaspora: Cuba and Puerto Rico.
HIST 390W. The Civil Rights Movement.
HIST 390Z. American Migration Myths.

INDS 239. Black Women in Music.
INDS 262. Ethnomusicology: African Diaspora.
INDS s21. Writing a Black Environment.

MUS 240C. Politics and Pop since 1960.
MUS 247. Jazz and Blues: History and Practice.
MUS 254. Music and Drama.
MUS s29. American Musicals on Film.

POLS 115. American Government and Public Policy.
POLS 118. Law and Politics.
POLS 211. American Parties and Elections.
POLS 215. Political Participation in the United States.
POLS 228. Constitutional Freedoms.
POLS 229. Race and Civil Rights in Constitutional Interpretation.
POLS 235. Black Women in the Americas.
POLS 249. Politics of Latin America.
POLS 276. American Foreign Policy.
POLS 310. Public Opinion.
POLS 325. Constitutional Rights and Social Change.
POLS 329. Law and Gender.
POLS 349. Indigenous Movements in Latin America.
POLS 422. Social Justice Internships.
POLS s21. Internships in Community Service.

PY/SO 210. Social Psychology.

REL 247. City upon the Hill.
REL 255. African American Religious Traditions.
REL 270. Religion and American Visual Culture.
REL 365B. W. E. B. Du Bois and American Culture.
REL s24. Religion and the City.
REL s27. Field Studies in Religion: Cult and Community.

RHET 260. Lesbian and Gay Images in Film.
RHET 265. The Rhetoric of Women's Rights.
RHET 275. African American Public Address.
RHET 386. Language and Communication of Black Americans.
RHET 390. Contemporary Rhetoric.
RHET 391A. The Rhetoric of Alien Abduction.
RHET 391B. Presidential Campaign Rhetoric.
RHET s30. Television Criticism: Prime-Time Women.

SOC 120. Race, Gender, Class, and Society.
SOC 220. Family and Society.
SOC 270. Sociology of Gender.
SOC 395B. Beliefs about Social Inequality.

SPAN 215. Readings in Spanish American Literature.
SPAN 225. Diaspora: Identity and Culture.
SPAN 245. Social Justice in Hispanic Literature.
SPAN 247. Latin American Travel Fiction.
SPAN 250. The Latin American Short Story.
SPAN 264. Mexican Women Writers.
SPAN 342. Hybrid Cultures: Latin American Intersections.
SPAN 343. Contemporary Latin American Literature.

WGST 100. Introduction to Women and Gender Studies.
WGST 350. Walking the Edge: About Borders.

Courses

AA/AC 119. Cultural Politics. This course examines the relationship of culture to politics. It introduces the study of struggles to acquire, maintain, or resist power and gives particular attention to the role culture plays in reproducing and contesting social divisions of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Lectures and discussion incorporate film, music, and fiction in order to evaluate the connection between cultural practices and politics. Not open to students who have received credit for Political Science 119. Normally offered every year. J. McClendon.

INDS 165. African American Philosophers. This course focuses on how African American philosophers confront and address philosophical problems. Students consider the relationship between the black experience and traditional themes in Western philosophy. Attention is also given to the motivations and context sustaining African American philosophers. Recommended background: African American Studies 140A or African American Studies/American Cultural Studies 119. Cross-listed in African American studies, American cultural studies, and philosophy. Enrollment limited to 40. Not open to students who have received credit for African American Studies 165. Offered with varying frequency. J. McClendon.

ACS 220. Fieldwork in American Cultural Studies. Central to the Program in American Cultural Studies is the examination of and engagement with diverse American communities. Students in this course first consider their own positions, identities, and privileges within America, and then, using gender, class, and race analysis, they investigate the historical cultures of the College and the Lewiston community. In cooperation with the Center for Service-Learning, students also work in service-oriented agencies. Besides extensive fieldwork, students participate in weekly seminar discussions, and prepare a research paper relevant to their experience. Enrollment limited to 12. Normally offered every year. M. Creighton.

ACS 237. Multicultural Education. An examination of the cultural and political dimensions of multicultural education as an academic and intellectual undertaking. Students explore how social divisions on the basis of unequal access and control of cultural institutions and instruments reproduce and affirm conditions of domination. Yet, the cultural resistance movements offer new alternatives to the dominant culture. Recommended background: courses in the social sciences and humanities. Open to first-year students. Offered with varying frequency. J. McClendon.

INDS 240. Theory and Method in African American Studies. This course addresses the relationship between political culture and cultural politics within African American studies. Particular attention is paid to the contending theories of cultural criticism. Cornel West, Molefi Asante, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Maramba Ani, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. are some of the theorists under review. Recommended background: African American Studies/American Cultural Studies 119 or significant work in political science, American cultural studies, or African American studies. Cross-listed in African American studies, American cultural studies, and philosophy. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 50. Not open to students who have received credit for American Cultural Studies 240 or Political Science 240. Offered with varying frequency. J. McClendon.

INDS 250. Interdisciplinary Studies: Methods and Modes of Inquiry. Interdisciplinarity involves more than a meeting of disciplines. Practitioners stretch methodological norms and reach across disciplinary boundaries. Through examination of a single topic, this course introduces students to interdisciplinary methods of analysis. Students examine what practitioners actually do and work to become practitioners themselves. Prerequisite(s): African American Studies 140A or Women and Gender Studies 100, and one other course in African American studies, American cultural studies, or women and gender studies. Cross-listed in African American studies, American cultural studies, and women and gender studies. Enrollment limited to 40. Not open to students who have received credit for African American Studies 250, American Cultural Studies 250, or Women and Gender Studies 250. Normally offered every year. E. Rand.

INDS 260. United States Latina/Chicana Writings. This course rests on two conceptual underpinnings: Gloria Anzaldua's Nueva Mestiza, and the more recent "U.S. Pan-latinidad" postulated by the Latina Feminist Group. The literary and theoretical production of Chicanas and Latinas is examined through these lenses. Particular attention is given to developing a working knowledge of the key historical and cultural discourses engaged by these writings and the various contemporary United States Latina and Chicana positionalities vis-�-vis popular ethnic representations. The course also examines the function given to marketable cultural productions depending on the different agents involved. Cross-listed in American cultural studies, Spanish, and women and gender studies. Open to first-year students. Offered with varying frequency. C. Aburto Guzm�n.

INDS 291. Exhibiting Cultures. This course examines the politics of exhibiting cultures. Each week the course analyzes specific exhibitions of cultural artifacts, visual culture, and the cultural body as a means to evaluate the larger issues surrounding such displays. These includes issues of race, colonialism, postcolonialism, and curatorial authority in relation to the politics of exhibiting cultures. A field trip to analyze an exhibition is a critical part of the students' experience in the course. Students are required to lead a discussion of the readings, participate in discussions, write a research paper deconstructing an exhibition, and work with a group to design their own theoretical exhibition. Cross-listed in African American studies, American cultural studies, and art. Offered with varying frequency. Staff.

INDS 339. Africana Thought and Practice. This seminar examines in depth a broad range of black thought. Students consider the various philosophical problems and the theoretical issues and practical solutions offered by such scholar/activists as W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Claudia Jones, C. L. R. James, Leopold Senghor, Amilcar Cabrah, Charlotta Bass, Lucy Parsons, Walter Rodney, and Frantz Fanon. Recommended background: a course on the Africana world, or a course in philosophy or political theory. Cross-listed in African American studies, American cultural studies, and philosophy. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 15. Not open to students who have received credit for American Cultural Studies 339 or Political Science 339. Offered with varying frequency. J. McClendon.

ACS 348. Race and Ethnicity in America. An investigation of how race and ethnicity as cultural and political categories in the United States are materially anchored in specific sets of social relations. Of particular import is the concept of whiteness as a racial category, and its connection to racism and national oppression. What social groups are excluded from the racial category of white and how are they consequently excluded from American nationality? Enrollment limited to 15. Offered with varying frequency. J. McClendon.

ACS 360. Independent Study. Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester. Normally offered every semester. Staff.

ACS 457, 458. Senior Thesis. Under the supervision of a faculty advisor, all majors write an extended essay that utilizes the methods of at least two disciplines. Students register for American Cultural Studies 457 in the fall semester and for American Cultural Studies 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both American Cultural Studies 457 and 458. Normally offered every year. Staff.

Short Term Units

INDS s18. African American Culture through Sports. Sports in African American life have served in a variety of ways to offer a means for social, economic, cultural, and even political advancement. This unit examines how sports have historically formed and contemporaneously shape the contours of African American culture. Particular attention is given to such questions as segregation, gender equity, cultural images, and their political effects for African American athletes and the black community. In addition to the required and recommended readings, lectures, and discussions, videos and films are central to the teaching and learning process. Cross-listed in African American studies, American cultural studies, and philosophy. Open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 30. Not open to students who have received credit for American Cultural Studies s18 or Political Science s18. Offered with varying frequency. J. McClendon.

ACS s50. Independent Study. Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term. Normally offered every year. Staff.