First-Year Writing Seminar: Immigration, Race, and Citizenship in the United States

Catalog description

In this course, we will survey important themes in the history of American immigration through fiction, poetry, memoir, and film. Since the earliest European settlement, America has provided a refuge for the poor, the disadvantaged, and religiously persecuted seeking a new life. Yet American history has also been crucially defined by those immigrants who came here unwillingly or under duress, whether African slaves, indentured servants, or refugees. The continual cheap source of labor that immigration has provided helped fuel the rise of American capitalism, but has also undermined the privileges of established groups, often provoking nativism along racial, ethnic, and religious lines. In this regard, the history of immigration is inextricable from the politics of the Other. Through literature about immigration, we will explore common experiences across four centuries including: the arrival of European religious dissenters and African enslaved people in colonial America; the struggle of refugees from Irish famine and Russian pogroms to establish themselves in industrial America; exclusion and racial discrimination against Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian immigrants; economic migrants from Mexico and the Caribbean seeking work in fields and cities; and the internal Great Migration of Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. Course texts will draw on the work of Willa Cather, Thomas Bell, Charles Reznikoff, Isabel Wilkerson, Toyo Soyemoto, Francis Ford Coppola, Jonathan Gold, Ramin Bahrani, Caribbean Fragoza and others along with an introduction to key legislation and political events in U.S. immigration history. Students will hone their compositional and close-reading skills through short essays, a longer analytical paper, and creative options.