American Gangster

Instructor: Sean Nash
SF / DIVSM–300 / 15 sessions
Prerequisite: ENG1, Intro to Modern Arts, Foundations in Critical Studies
June 3–July 8 (no class 7/5), Mon./Wed./Fri., 2–5 p.m.

A survey of American criminal culture from frontier contact through the financial crises of the current era. From the boardwalk to the boardroom, various ethnic groups have utilized black market economies to segue into social mobility. Is the current rash of corporate malfeasance connected to a new wave of American criminality? Or are the tools we have for understanding and assessing the impact of corporate crime just getting better? Did the promotion of violence in TV, film, and popular music affect the formation of the modern American psyche? How different is crime today than it was at the turn of the 20th century? Is crime always a response to the pressure brought on by economic downturns? How does the glamorization of gangster culture impact the moral development of our youth? Join us for a discussion of these and related topics, and for an exploration of the stereotypes that dominate media on the subject.

This course satisfies a Diversity Studies seminar.

Animé-tion: Post-Humanism, Art Mecho, Political Ecology, and Cultural Economy

Instructor: Ignacio Valero
OAK / DIVSM-300 / 15 sessions
Prerequisite: ENG2, CULTH 200, Jr standing or instructor permission
June 3–July 8 (no class July 4), Mon./Wed./Thurs., 6:45–9:45 p.m.

A long decade-plus ago one could see Mao Zedong in Mickey Mouse Ears, a Zapatista Slogan, and a panel of a scene from Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira sharing common space on a crumbling wall. It was then war-torn Sarajevo, but it could now be an imagined Neo-Tokyo, New York, Cairo, Damascus, Kabul, Athens, Rome, London, Madrid, Paris, Buenos Aires, Chiapas, Rio or Shanghai –¬¬ “Glocal” places impacted by hybrid modernities, economy, polity, and aesthetics.

Could such icons and graffiti, and sundry other, be read as mere satire, adult rage, youthful angst or “just” pop culture? Or, seen as a cry for help, perhaps an aesthetic(s) of the common(s), an archaic postmodern? Could it be the projective screen of a passing order, hanging on desperately through the logos of a neoliberal techno-organic delirium, trying to confront the apocalyptic puzzles of the new millennium? Or, maybe, it is the traces of a vast post-human dis/order struggling to emerge?

This course explores aspects of this conundrum through the artful visual socio-ecologies of Animé, a Japanese animation art form that tries to break through the thick ramparts of the local via a series of emotions, moving images, figures and reflections that resonate across a varied global audience. Universal themes of love, wisdom, nature, gender, beauty, war and peace, eroticism, youth, old age, combine with questions of human origins, survival, power, cultural diversity, change, identity, magic, religion, science/ fiction, vampire, zombie and cyborg aesthetics and technology, or with flashes of pure entertainment – to make it an apt visual field for a contemporary local study of a political economy and political ecology of global cultural production: a post-human “Art Mecho,” and then some.

Due to its interdisciplinary nature, this course fulfills a Methods seminar, or Diversity Studies seminar, Social Sciences requirement, or H&S elective.

The following summer study abroad course also satisfies a Diversity Studies seminar:

• Berlin Past & Present with Karen Fiss