Topics in the Literature of American Cultures

Even as we prepare to mark the 150th anniversary of the end of the American Civil War (on May 9th, 2015), secessionist movements — from Texas’s ongoing struggles to regain its status as a separate nation to the anti-corporate Second Vermont Republic independence effort — are still going strong.While it seems unlikely that the United States will actually lose any of its fifty members in the near future, communities within the larger United States maintain a notable tradition of rejecting claims of American sovereignty and striking out to establish their own independent or semi-independent collectives.

Departing from narratives of cultural assimilation common to visions of the American melting pot, this course will focus instead on the historical and popular legacies of separatist movements in the United States. We will ask: how do the manifestos of idealist and revolutionary groups, including the 19th-century free-loving Fourierists, the lesbian separatists of the 1970s, or Oakland’s own Black Panthers, reveal contemporary debates about what it means (or should mean) to be an American resident and citizen? How have federal and state authorities engaged historically with separatist communities and with sovereign indigenous nations within the geographical borders of the United States? What have been the long-term and inter-generational effects of the state-sponsored separation of minority communities such as the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II? And how do these legacies of both voluntary and involuntary cultural separation continue to influence current American politics and popular culture? We will consider these questions (among many) through active class discussion and regular writing assignments.