AFST 380MProgram Implementation & Eval

Catalog

Recently, and highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement, racial differences have come to be marked by distinct relations to the law, law represented by the police, the government, and the courts. Do individual ethnic groups, within the United States, in fact view the law in dissimilar fashions? And does the law diversely regard and address separate ethnicities? This course explores such questions through crime fiction and film, texts in which race, law enforcement, the court system, and the state intersect. The class will also strive to establish how, or if, calling attention to the mistreatment of particular ethnic groups by the legal order actually compels this order (police, judges, politicians) to alter its conduct and policies. After establishing the nature of crime fiction through classic works by Hammett (Maltese Falcon), Chandler (Big Sleep), and Thompson (Population 1280), we will explore the intersection of race and justice in texts by African-American (Himes, Mosley, Locke, Whitehead), Hispanic-American (Anaya, Hinojoso, Chazin), and Asian-American (Biggers, Chang) authors. Films of the novels will also be studied.