Course Description:

This course will examine the U.S. Black autobiographical tradition from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to its present iterations. Black autobiography will be constituted broadly to include long-form prose, slave narratives, poems, a sketch, essays, a biomythography, and a meditation. The course will privilege the study of the Black autobiographical tradition as a literary tradition. As such, we will consider questions of form, genre, publication history, narrative voice, language, audience and other literary markers critical to understanding the literariness of Black autobiographies. We will also consider the socio-political, historical, and economic milieus that shaped Black autobiographers’ lives and the telling of their stories. As we journey through the Black autobiographical tradition, I invite us to consider how Black autobiographies and autobiographers engaged and continue to engage the central meditation-cum-query found in Carolyn Rodgers’ poem, Breakthrough:

                                                                            How do I put myself on paper

                                                                            The way I want to be or am and be

                                                                            Not like any one else in this

                                                                            Black world but me (12-15).

This course is designed to introduce students to the interdisciplinary field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. This course looks at the diverse histories of Indigenous nations across North America, as well as histories of shared experiences with ongoing colonialism, legacies of resistance and connections to place. The class focuses on Indigenous perspectives, intellectual traditions and critical interventions across time through the work of historians, anthropologists, philosophers, literary scholars, Indigenous knowledge keepers, poets, writers and activists. This course is required for a Native American and Indigenous Studies focus for American Studies majors.

It is often noted in mainstream news media that Indigenous peoples are “on the front lines” of the climate crisis, while providing little explanation as to why this is. Narratives of inherent Indigenous vulnerability obscure the ways in which Indigenous communities have mobilized to navigate environmental change, not only in the face of contemporary global warming, but historically, as settler colonial incursions radically transformed landscapes and constrained Indigenous knowledge practices that have provided tools for adaptation for thousands of years. This course considers how Indigenous climate vulnerability is largely a product of settler colonialism—not only a process and system, but also a particular way of understanding and relating to the nonhuman environment.

This course is an introduction to major themes in social and cultural anthropology. We will examine the concepts, methods, and theories anthropologists employ to understand the unity and diversity of human experiences across different regional contexts, with an emphasis on social, cultural, political, and economic systems of inequality. 

Perhaps you are taking this course because you are interested in becoming an anthropology major. Perhaps you are considering pursuing a career in anthropological research. If this is your situation, this course is a great place to start. But for many others – maybe even a majority of you – this might be the first or only anthropology course you will take at Smith – though I hope you will be inspired to take more! By the end of this course, you will learn what it means to “think anthropologically” in ways that I hope can serve you in any career path you choose and in your everyday life, at Smith and beyond.

To “think anthropologically” is much more than a specialized course of study; it is a way of observing and understanding the diverse practices, ideas, and sentiments through which human beings build their daily lives in an ever-changing world. Thinking anthropologically is a mode of asking critical questions about what human beings share in common and what makes us distinct from each other. Thinking anthropologically means learning to pay attention to conditions, perspectives, and structures of inequality that are often taken for granted or invisible. It gives us a conceptual tool-box for analyzing deeply complex topics like culture, race, and gender in more critical and nuanced ways. 

The cornerstone of anthropological research is ethnographic fieldwork, which is a qualitative method based on long-term participatory observation among particular groups of people in specific places. Such an immersive, fine-grained approach to research allows anthropologists to analyze how ordinary people experience the pressing challenges of our time, from issues of racism to histories of colonialism, to forced displacement, to climate change, to economic crisis. 

Thinking anthropologically also means critically engaging with the discipline’s origins and the fraught histories of colonialism, racism, and inequality in which anthropology — like all modern academic disciplines — is embedded. In the first few weeks of the semester, we will trace anthropology’s intellectual roots in 19th- and early 20th-century debates in Europe and North America about evolution and the “scientific” study of human diversity. We will then consider how anthropological research has critically evolved in relation to this history. Throughout the course, we will ask: What texts and topics are considered the “classics” of anthropology, and what does this exclude? What aspects of the classic anthropological enterprise of documenting cultural differences should be retained, and what should be abandoned or rethought? And what does it mean to “decolonize” anthropology today?

Final Research Project Statement

For your Thursday meeting, 9/23, you are to bring a written draft of your research proposal. I will not collect this draft - but it should contain notes, ideas, and questions. You should come prepared to discuss what topic, site, cultural area, etc. you have decided to research and write about. Our meeting time is intended to hone your ideas as you have developed them thus far; please come prepared.

The Research Statement which is due on midnight, Thursday, September 23 on Moodle, should clearly state, in one or two paragraphs (about 250 words) what you propose to research. Avoid generalizations and vague statements, be specific in what you intend to research. Focus on a specific aspect of a given site or culture area, e.g., Çatalhöyük spanned 1,100 years and so it would be important to decide what period you wanted to examine (Early, Middle or Late). Likewise, decide what aspect of life at Çatalhöyük you would you research - health and disease, diet, settlement patterns, ritual and symbolism, gender, domestic plants and/or animals, etc. The field is limitless! I suggest choosing a topic you are interested in learning more about.

I look forward to seeing you on Thursday. Please stay tuned for where our meetings will take place; I am still hoping to meet under the pagoda, with a sweater and a thermos of tea if necessary! 

Thank you,

Professor Mangan

This course is designed to introduce you to the field of art history, that is, to what art historians of any specialty do when we study works of art. It broaches several topics within the history of art such as site-specific installation, the readymade, the history of commemorative sculpture, and the convergence of photography and performance art. It is not a survey but instead features a series of seminar-like explorations into particular works of art. Divided into four units, it will facilitate consideration of the ways in which artists reference and converse with-- sometimes intentionally, sometimes not-- previous art historical periods and genres, as well as cultural and visual traditions more broadly. Each unit in the course begins with and hinges on a close examination of a contemporary art piece. Subsequent weeks in each unit dive into the various topics integral to the study of those particular works. When we focus on Mickalene Thomas’s A Little Taste Outside of Love (2007), for instance, we will address the reclining female nude, the concept of the gaze, the collage aesthetic, the legacy of Orientalism and “othering,” and finally the visual rhetorics of Blackness and post-Blackness in the history of art. By the end of the course, you should have an intimate sense of some critical art historical tropes, as well as the deep investigative work of art history that incorporates related fields of social, political, and cultural history, as well as material and popular culture.

This course (which is, I think, unique in a liberal arts college curriculum) is a survey of the genre of artist’s books from its beginnings in the political and artistic avant-garde movements of Europe at the turn of the 20th century through contemporary American conceptual bookworks. In particular, the course will examine the varieties of form and expression used by book artists and the relationships between these artists and the socio-cultural, literary, and graphic environments from which they emerged. Along the way we will also explore the relationship of the artists book to other genres of artistic expression, including sculpture, architecture, conceptual art, and performance art. In so doing I hope to help you to develop critical skills – that is, how to look at, describe, and talk about complex works of art – and to interact with them on several levels.