ETHN 203

Ethnic Studies 203: Cultural Studies and Cultural Production

Sandra Cisneros, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Cherrie Moraga, Yvonne Yarbro-

Bejarano in Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (Lourdes Portillo, 1999).

Curtis Marez
Wednesday, 11-1:50, SSB 103
Office Hours: W 2-3:30

Culture, especially in the limited sense of white high culture (literature, music, fine art), has long
been studied in traditional Humanities disciplines and, more recently, they have incorporated
multicultural frameworks and objects of analysis. Culture has also been taken up in different
ways in the Social Sciences, especially in Anthropology and Communication but also across the
disciplines, even in Economics.1 For the last three decades or so scholars in a wide range of
disciplines have written about the “cultural turn” in their fields. A Google Scholar search for the
term “cultural turn” yields over 46,000 results. While overdetermined, these turns to culture can
be partly understood as responses to the topic of this course-- the historical and ongoing
conversations between British Cultural Studies and U.S. Ethnic Studies.

British Cultural Studies was represented by the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
the University of Birmingham, a public university in the deindustrializing northern city. The
“School” in the phrase “the Birmingham School” literally refers to its institutional location in a
post-industrial public university with an increasingly working-class, African, West Indian, and
South Asian diasporic student body. While the analogy is imprecise, it may be helpful to think
that the University of Birmingham is to Oxford as Harvard is to Detroit’s Wayne State.

1
Linda Ghent, Alan Grant and George Lesica, “The Economics of Seinfeld,” Critical Commons,
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/ccManager/lectures/economics-of-seinfeld.

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Stuart Hall served as the director of the CCCS from 1969-1979, a period roughly coinciding with
the emergence of Ethnic Studies and related interdisciplinary fields in the U.S. academy, or what
Roderick Ferguson calls the reorder of all things academic inspired by student of color demands
for interlocking redistributions of material and representational resources (i.e. “give us access to
education and teach us about our cultures.”)2

The CS/ES formation is defined by forms of historical materialism that draw upon but revise
Marxism to study intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, colonialism, nation, and empire.
The dialogue between Birmingham and Ethnic Studies is initially most directly evident in the
1990s (see readings for 4/10) and thus one aim of the course is to project its historical
genealogy into the present. A second aim of the course is to theorize the significance of culture
in non-reductive ways, moving beyond models of reflection in which culture instrumentally
mirrors dominant social structures to instead consider cultural productions and practices as
central components of political struggles and subaltern social movements.

The variety of cultural forms and practices analyzed in CS/ES research is too expansive to
exhaustively survey in 10 weeks, so our focus will be on visual cultures in particular. “Visual
culture” is a larger umbrella term organizing research into heterogeneous “practices of seeing
and showing.”3 Under that umbrella we will consider photography, visual art, film, television,
and digital media. Hence a third aim of the course is to introduce the overlapping specificity of
different visual forms while developing practical tools for incorporating visual evidence into
your own research projects.

READINGS

One required textbook is available for purchase in the UCSD bookstore—Lucy Lippard, ed.,
Partial Recall. Cheaper copies may be had on the internet. I also ordered a two-volume set of
essays by Stuart Hall that I decided not to use so you don’t need to buy it. Unless otherwise
noted, all other readings are available as pdfs on Triton Ed. In a number of cases I’ve uploaded
entire books when you only need to read a chapter, so be sure to carefully consult the
schedule of readings.

Course readings are of 3 types: foundational texts; brief, broadly synthetic essays providing
critical genealogies of key terms and fields; and case studies of different forms of visual culture.
There are also a number of “bonus” readings from my projected collection of essays on Chicanx
Cultural Studies; they are not required and I don’t expect you to read them. I imagine them as
notes to myself and hopefully potential reference points if you’re interested in investigating the
topics they cover or the perspectives they suggest that I will bring to class discussions.

ASSIGNMENTS

2
Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference
(Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
3
WTJ Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 1.2 (2002).

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Participation. Keeping up with the reading will be necessary to engage in conversation and to
participate in specialized discussion exercises. The theory and practice of course discussion
exercises are described by Cathy Davidson, “An ‘Active Learning’ Kit: Rationale, Methods,
Models, Research, Bibliography,” https://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-
davidson/2017/11/15/active-learning-kit-rationale-methods-models-research-bibliography.
Please show up on time and plan to attend every class short of an emergency. Should you have to
miss class please inform me in advance if possible.

Five reading responses, two pages in length. Please email your responses to me by midnight
the day before the relevant class meeting. In your presentations and response papers, don’t just
summarize the content of the readings; reflect critically on the author(s)'s intellectual project,
using the following questions as a point of departure:

What are the works’ central questions? What are their theoretical frameworks and what
is their critical interventions? What forms of evidence do the authors use and is their use
effective? What disciplinary/interdisciplinary methods do they mobilize and how?

Class Presentation of no longer than 15 minutes. Presentations should address the

questions in italics above. Please also compose 1-2 page handout that highlights key points and
at least 3 questions for discussion. While presentations should summarize a reading’s central
claims, the aim is not to exhaustively describe the work but to frame broader discussions.
You can also connect the reading to your own research project(s).
After their formal presentation, presenters are responsible for leading discussion, so be
prepared pose questions or present discussion exercises.

A final 10 -12 page paper due on June 14. As an alternative to a paper, you may construct
a digital video lecture using the “Critical Commons” platform. Here is a link to an example, a
lecture for an ETHN undergraduate class on the crisis in public education:
http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/cmarez/lectures/The-University-of-
California-in-Popular-Media. The technical capacities required are not especially difficult,
but starting early will help. In any event, by week 9 everyone should consult with me about
their final projects.

ADA Statement. If you need accommodations, please inform me and bring a notification letter
outlining your approved accommodations. You may also seek assistance or information from the
Office for Students with Disabilities, 858/534/4382.

SCHEDULE

4/3 Keywords

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For our first meeting we will discuss the historical origins and subsequent elaboration of
“keywords” as part of different cultural studies projects. Such projects begin with Keywords by
Raymond Williams, a founding figure in British Cultural Studies and New Left whose work has
inspired over the last decade or so a number of keywords books in Ethnic Studies and related
fields.4 Since the more recent texts draw upon him, you may want to start with the
readings by Williams.

Maribel Casas-Cortes, Sebastian Cobarrubias, Nicholas De Genova, Glenda Garelli, Giorgio

Grappi, Charles Heller, Sabine Hess, Bernd Kasparek, Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, Irene
Peano, Lorenzo Pezzani, John Pickles, Federico Rahola, Lisa Riedner, Stephan Scheel & Martina
Tazzioli, “New Keywords: Migration and Borders,” Cultural Studies 29:1 (2015).

Erica Edwards, Roderick Ferguson and Jeffery Ogbar, “Introduction,” Keywords for African
American Studies (2018). This volume does not include an entry specifically for “culture” but
the introduction engages Williams. It is part of the sample of the book available to
download on Amazon.

Robert G. Lee, “Culture,” Keywords for Asian American Studies, eds. Cathy J. Schlund-Vials K.
Scott Wong and Linda Trinh Vō (New York: NYU Press, 2015)

Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Michelle Raheja and Andrea Smith, “Tradition,” Native Studies Key
Words (University of Arizona Press, 2015). This volume does not include an entry on culture but
does include one by Raheja on “visual sovereignty” (a concept she theorizes at greater length in
the reading for 4/24), as well as this entry on “Tradition,” which engages the term “culture.”

Raymond Williams, “Introduction” and “Culture,” Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and

Society (1983/1976).
4
Williams’ Keywords book was originally planned as an appendix for his Culture and Society,
https://archive.org/details/culturesociety17001850mbp/page/n3. In addition to the texts listed here, NYU has
published Keywords for Disability Studies, Keywords for Children’s Literature, Keywords for Environmental
Studies, and Keywords for Media Studies. Other recent works in the genre include Patrick John Leary,
Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Haymarket, 2019); Keywords in Sound, eds. David Novak and Matt
Sakakeeny (Duke, 2015); Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Digital Culture and Society, ed. Benjamin Peters
(Princeton, 2016); and Keywords in Youth Studies: Tracing Affects, Movements, and Knowledge, eds. Nancy Lesco
and Susan Talbert, (Routledge, 2012).

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George Yú dice, “Culture,” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, eds. Bruce Burgett and
Glenn Hendler (NYU Press, 2007/2014)

Bonus: CM, “Popular Culture,” Keywords for Latina/o Studies (2017), eds. Deborah R. Vargas,
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, and Nancy Raquel Mirabel (NYU Press, 2017).

4/10 Reading and Screening Stuart Hall

A cat watching you

watching The Stuart
Hall Project

The readings by Hall in this unit were published in 1992 (a coincidence we should try to
historicize in discussion) and they are all important in the dissemination of cultural studies
concepts and method in the United States.

“Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies” (1992) is based on a presentation at the “Cultural
Studies Now and in the Future” conference at the University of Illinois Champaign, Urbana
(1990), and published in an anthology of the conference papers titled Cultural Studies. 5

“What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” (1992) is from a presentation at a conference in
Harlem and first published in an anthology titled Black Popular Culture edited by Gina Dent.

“The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” is Chapter 6 in Formations of Modernity (Hall
and Gieben, 1992), part of a series of textbooks Hall edited for a large undergraduate sequence
called D213: Understanding Modern Societies at the Open University, a distance learning
college where course materials where partly delivered via radio, TV, and ultimately the internet.

5
The table of contents for the volume represents an interesting genealogical roadmap:
https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Studies-Lawrence-Grossberg/dp/0415903459.

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The Stuart Hall Project (John Akomfrah, 2013), https://vimeo.com/303483549. Akomfrah is a
director from the Ghanaian diaspora in Britain and an important interlocutor for Hall.6

4/17 Visual Culture

WEB Dubois’ graphs for the Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1900).

The field of visual culture studies is represented by a number of anthologies and its own journal
and professional association. Mirzoeff has helped define the field by playing vital roles in all
three areas.7 His essay articulates some of the broader conceptual stakes of visual culture studies
for Ethnic Studies projects so you may want to begin with it.

Michael Cucher, “Concrete Utopias from the Central Valley to Southern California: Repurposing
Images of Emiliano Zapata in Chicana/o Murals,” Aztlán 43.1 (Spring 2018).

Lucy Lippard, ed., Partial Recall: With Photos of Native Americans (New York: New Press,
1993).

Trinh T Mihn-ha, “The Image and the Void,” Journal of Visual Culture 15.1 (2015).

Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011).

Bonus: CM, “Obama’s Blackberry,” Journal of Visual Culture 8.2 (Nov. 2009).

4/24 Film Production

6
For Cultural Studies and the history of Black British cinema, see chapters 22 and 24, Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (Routledge, 1996),
https://filsafattimur.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/critical-dialogues-in-cultural-studies.pdf. For a study of Akomfrah,
see “Untimely Meditations: Reflections on Black Audio Collective,” Nika: Journal of Contemporary African Art 19
(Summer 2004), http://www.essayfilmfestival.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/19.eshun_.pdf
7
For example, see Mirzoeff’s edited volume The Visual Culture Reader, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2012).

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 The Devil Never Sleeps (Lourdes Portillo, 1994)

The field of film studies topics is vast, but this unit is focused on processes of production for
Indigenous filmmakers/filmmakers of color.

Rosa Linda Fregoso, “Devils and Ghosts, Mothers and Immigrants: A Critical Retrospective of
the Works of Lourdes,” Portillo, Lourdes Portillo: The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films
(University of Texas, 2001)

Michelle Raheja, “Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat

(The Fast Runner),” in Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and
Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010)

Luisa Schein and Va-Megn Thoj, “Gran Torino’s Boys and Men with Guns: Hmong
Perspectives,” Hmong Studies Journal 10 (January 2010).

Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, “The L.A. Rebellion Plays Itself,” in The L.A. Rebellion: Creating a
New Black Cinema, eds. Allyson Nadia Field, Jan-Christopher Horak, Jacqueline Najuma
Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

Suggested: Allan Rowe, “Film Form And Narrative,” in An Introduction to Film Studies
(London: Routledge, 1996). This essay provides an introduction to the signifying elements of
film production with plenty of examples. It will serve as the basis for a brief keynote
presentation.

In-class screening, The Devil Never Sleeps (Portillo, 1994).

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Bonus: CM “Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the History of Star Wars,” Race After the Internet,
eds. Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White (Routledge, 2012).

5/1 Film Spectatorship

Compton residents Ruby and Brian travel to West LA to watch Ali, Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder, 1974) in
The Middle of Nowhere (Ava DuVernay, 2012)

Research on marginalized film audiences is often historically focused, involving informed

speculation on spectator perspectives. The exception among these readings is the essay by
Avalos, which employs ethnographic methods.

Adá n Avalos, “¡Que Naco! Mexican Popular Cinema, La Banda del Carro Rojo and the
Audience,” in Valuing Films: Shifting Perceptions of Worth, ed. Laura Hubner (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Saidiya Hartman, “A Note on Method,” and “Mistah Beauty, the Autobiography of an Ex-
Colored Woman, Select Scenes from a Film Never Cast by Oscar Micheaux, Harlem, 1920s,” in
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: WW.
Norton, 2019).

Fatimah Tobing Rony, “Introduction: The Third Eye,” The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and
Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke UP, 1996).

Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, “’Negroes Laughing at Themselves’? Black Spectatorship and the
Performance of Urban Modernity,” Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban
Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

Suggested: bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” Black Looks: Race and Representation (South
End Press, 1992).

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Bonus: CM, “Subaltern Soundtracks: Mexican Immigrants and the Making of Hollywood
Cinema,” Aztlán 29.1 (Spring 2004).

5/8 No Class

5/15 Transnational Film and Media

Scenes from First Person Plural (Deann Borshey Liem, 2000) and Daughter from Danang (Gail Dolgin and
Vincente Franco, 2oo2).

This unit centers transnational film and media, particularly transpacific contexts. The Klein
essay is about South Korean director Bong Joon-ho, known for speculative works such as The
Host (2006), Okja (2017) and Snowpiercer (2017), but you might be interested in his graduate
student horror film, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000). While not always thought of in this
context, following Ramirez,8 we will also provisionally consider Native and American and
Indigenous media under the rubric of the transnational.

Nitin Govil, “Economies of Devotion: Affective Engagement and the Subject(s) of Labor,”
Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay (NYU Press,
2015).

Joanna Hearne, “Native American and Indigenous Media,” Feminist Media Histories 4.2 (Spring
2018).

Christina Klein, “Why American Studies Needs to Think About Korean Cinema, or
Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon-ho,” American Quarterly 60.4 (December
2008).

Jodi Kim, “An ‘Orphan’ with Two Mothers: Transnational and Transracial Adoption, the Cold
War, and Contemporary Asian American Cultural Politics,” American Quarterly 61.4 (December
2009).

Yiman Wang, “Transnational Media Cultures,” Feminist Media Histories 4.2 (Spring 2018).
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Renya K. Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007).

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Bonus: CM, “Pancho Vila Meets Sun Yat Sen: Third World Revolution and the History of
Hollywood Cinema,” American Literary History 17.3 (Fall 2005).

5/22 Television

The classic essay here is Torres’ “King TV,” about the amateur video of LAPD officers beating
Rodney King (1991). It is arguably the first viral video of anti-Black police violence. 9 It
inspired a famous essay by Judith Butler, “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and
White Paranoia.”10 Torres, however, theorizes “liveness” as the televisual burden born by
Black bodies. The essay should complement Alsultany’s essay about reality TV.

Evelyn Alsultany, “The Cultural Politics of Islam in U.S. Reality Television,” Communication,
Culture & Critique 9 (2016).

Mary Beltrá n, “Television,” Keywords for Latina/o Studies

Dustin Tahmahkera, “Introduction: Decolonizing Viewing, Decolonizing Views,” Tribal

Television: Viewing Native People in Sitcoms (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

Sasha Torres, “King TV,” Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights
(Princeton, 2003).

Rebecca Wanzo, “Precarious-Girl Comedy: Isa Rae, Lena Dunham, and Abjection Aesthetics,”
Camera Obscura 21.2 (2016).

In class screening, Moose TV, Season 1, Episode 7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=xzWEP36Q8wA&t=0s&index=8&list=PLXssjYeUyJVFCk70_pD5S1yxMJKh4Gbys
9
The video can be viewed here: https://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/march-1991-rodney-king-videotape-
9758031.
10
https://www.academia.edu/35952453/Butler_Judith_Endangered_endangering_schematic_racism_and_whi
te_paranoia.

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Bonus: CM, “From Mr. Chips to Scarface, or Racial Capitalism in Breaking Bad,” Critical
Inquiry In the Moment (2013), https://critinq.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/breaking-bad/

5/29 Digital Infrastructures

Shiprock Dedication Commemorative Brochure (1969), from Nakamura, Indigenous Circuits.

Digital culture is a broad field, but it sometimes overlooks the topic of this unit—the
environmental and labor consequences of digital infrastructures. For an important book length
study of the topic, see David Pellow and Lisa Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams:
Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (New York:
NYU, 2002).

Kara Keeling, “Queer OS,” Cinema Journal 53.2 (Winter 2014)

Marina Levina, “Network,” in Keywords for Media Studies, eds. Laurie Ouellette, Jonathan
Gray (New York: NYU, 2017).

Lisa Nakamura, “Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronics
Manufacture,” American Studies Quarterly 66.4 (2014).

Catherine S. Ramírez, “Ghost in the Machine: Marion C. Martinez’s Chicanafuturist Art and the
Decolonization of the Future,” Stitch & Split: Selves and Territories in Science Fiction, Fundació
Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain (March 2004).

Christian Sandvig, “Connection at Ewiiaapaayp Mountain: Indigenous Internet Infrastructure,”

Race After the Internet.

Bonus: CM, “The Homies in Silicon Valley: Figuring Styles of Life and Work in the
Information Age,” Aztlán 31.2 (Fall 2006).

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6/5 Digital Practices

The Transborder Immigrant Tool, as discussed

in Marez, “From Drones to Cropdusters.”

This unit focus on hacking and related, resistant uses of digital media.

K. Soraya Batanghelichi and Leila Mouri, “Cyberfeminism, Iranian Style: Online Feminism in
Post-2009 Iran,” Feminist Media Histories 3.1 (2017).

Jean Burgess, “Convergence,” in Keywords for Media Studies.

Marc Lamont Hill, “’Thank You, Black Twitter”: State Violence, Digital Counterpublics, and
Pedagogies of Resistance,” Urban Education 53.2 (2018).

Amit Rai, “A Political Economy of Juggadd,” in Jugadd Time: Ecologies of Everyday Hacking
in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

Nakamura “The Unwanted Labor of Social Media: Women of Color Call Out Culture as Venture
Community Management,” New Formations 86.1 (2016).

Bonus: CM, “From Drones to Cropdusters: Ricardo Dominquez’s Flying Machines,” Media
Fields Journal 12 (2017).

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