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Age of Empire

ENGL 083.401
instructor(s):
MWF 11-12

"Cultural Nationalism(s) in the Age of American Imperialism" This course will examine the fragmentation of "American" identity into a multiplicity of contentious cultural nationalisms as the country moved from the failure of Reconstruction to the assertion of imperial power in the Spanish American War. Students will be asked to consider what "America" meant to white women, black women, canonical authors, Chinese denied citizenship by the Exclusion Acts of 1882, Sioux Indians living on reservations, black nationalists, white southerners, white imperialists, and Chicana/os living in the borderlands. The course will engage a wide variety of "texts" from novels to the Ghost Dance, from Chinese Opera to the Washington monument, from corridos to historical monographs. Historical context will be an extremely important part of the class and each literary text will be paired with primary and/or secondary historical documents. There will be three papers of 7-10 pages in length.

fulfills requirements