239565 IAS Blockseminar, The Americas and Their Discontents (BS) (WiSe 2011/2012)

Let’s put it this way, the subject matter of this introductory course to Inter-American studies is the bi-continental hemisphere that expands from the Artic to the Antarctic and between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. In other words, this course critically engages with AMERICA which is also the object of study of Americanists in the fields of American, New American, Latin American, Inter-American, Hemispheric studies, but, some would claim, certainly is not the subject matter of Americanists working in the field of American American studies! From a historical perspective, as the reader might be guessing, we will inevitably engage with rhetorical issues, or what Bell Chevigny and Gari Laguardia have called continental “rhetorical malpractice,” and attempt to disentangle/grasp the unique and/or not so unique quality of Americanness of a territory that some have considered a volatile territory of chronic, if not, exceptional instability from the moment the hyperbolic Christopher Columbus set foot on it. Thus we will engage with proverbial questions such as: What is in a name? What is in the name America? Who claims/disclaims nationalist, linguistic, religious, geopolitical, and cultural spaces in America? Who establishes and confers the right to be American to the inhabitants of the American continent/the Americas? What is truly American in the Americas/the American continent? Who has the right to have (human) rights in the American continent? And most importantly, borrowing the words by the Argentinean essayist Ezekiel Martínez Estrada in another context, we will try to establish if there is an (imagined) American unity in what really is not (has not the right to be) American in the Americas?

Students will also attend some of the sections of the course:
“Human Rights: Literature and Film in the Americas”

Bibliography

Required Reading for the Blockseminar:

Students must have read the books before the course starts

- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written By Himself
- I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala by Rigoberta Menchú
- Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Required Reading for the Begleitseminar:

Students must start reading these (long) books to their earliest convenience

- Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America. London: Profile Books, 2009.
- Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Penguin, 2007.
- Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: First Herpel perennial Modern Classics, 2010.

- From The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy:
“Just and Unjust War,” “Columbus and Western Civilization,” “The Uses of Scholarship,” “Historian as Citizen,” “The Greatest Generation?,” “The Limits of Denial,” “America’s Blinders” “Violence and Human Nature,” and “My Country: The World.”