Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Emily Pope-Obeda
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00 - 5:00
This course examines the history of deportation in American society, and considers how the policing, exclusion, and expulsion of immigrant populations has shaped the nation. Through historical texts, primary sources, literature, and popular culture, we will cover a wide range of topics including racial quotas, guestworker expulsions, labor control, racialized health panics, national security scares, the disproportionate removal of black immigrants, the growth of immigrant detention, the criminalization of immigrant communities, and immigrant rights activism. Although mass deportation is often understood as a recent phenomenon, this course will demonstrate the ways that immigration control stretches as far back as creation of the United States. We will trace shifting opinions about immigration, the meaning of citizenship, statelessness, and national belonging.