239811 MA Betreuungsseminar, “Doing the Rights Thing in the Americas” (S) (WiSe 2012/2013)

IAS Blockseminar, “Doing the Rights Thing in the Americas”

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 may argue, 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 the name America? Who establishes and/or confers the right to be American to the inhabitants of the American continent/the Americas? Who is truly American in the Americas? Who has the right to have human rights in the Americas? 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?

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
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Additionally some extra reading will be made available at the beginning of the Blockseminar.

Required Reading for the Begleitseminar:

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

- Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History.New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
- 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.