American Borderlands

Catalog description

This course provides graduate students with an introduction to the field of American borderlands studies. It devotes a great deal of coverage to the most important of the nation's international frontiers, the U.S.-Mexico border, by detailing the various positions of Native Americans, Anglos, Asians, and Mexicans as they struggled over competing visions of an American future. But the course also attends to other major American frontiers, including the Atlantic littoral, the Canadian border, and the Pacific rim; it also examines all these in international context. In order to get a broad survey of the state of the field, we will examine how cross-cultural encounters shaped policy, changed the landscape, and heightened racial tensions. Using a variety of texts-documentary and feature films, magazine and newspaper articles, travelers' accounts, academic monographs and articles, and popular literature-we will explore a range of topics: territorial expansion, Native dispossession, racial formation and anxiety, Mexican, Asian, and Canadian migration and labor, and cultural change and negotiation. The course will begin with a close examination of the political, economic, and military conflicts that defined America's eastern, southern, northern, and western boundaries and then follow a series of selected historical events that led up to the current political and cultural debates that continue in the borderlands today. Drawing on these items, we will ultimately reflect on how past and present collide in all the nation's borderlands, shaping the United States in countless ways.