Instructor: Sam Dolbee
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:00-5:00 pm
This course follows people who moved (or were made to move) in, to, or from the Middle East and North Africa between the late nineteenth century and the present. It brings together a diverse group, including enslaved people, religious pilgrims, nomads, genocide survivors, refugees, experts, migrant laborers, revolutionaries, exiles, and, indeed, no shortage of people who might fall into several of these categories. Through these different forms of mobility and displacement, the course will trace the end of the Ottoman Empire, European colonialism, and national liberation across the region.... Read more about HIST-LIT 90EW: Migrants and Displacement in the Modern Middle East
The release of Crazy Rich Asians in 2018 was a significant cultural moment for Asian America: the first major Hollywood picture with a predominantly Asian American cast in over twenty years, the film was an immediate box office success, and followed by a proliferation of mainstream Asian American productions, including The Farewell, Indian Matchmaking, and Minari. This recent growth of Asian American media is especially remarkable, given that Asian America has been relatively invisible in the history of American popular culture. Why has there been such a limited range of Asian American representations, and how do we consider the significance of contemporary representations of Asian America... 
Although race is often presumed to be a visual phenomenon, it is also created and produced through sound. But what does race sound like? What might we learn when we attune our ears to the music and noise that race makes in popular music, on the stage, and in literature? How can texts like songs, films, and novels both reinforce and challenge cultural hierarchies and arrangements of social power? This course explores the sonification of race and the racialization of sound, music, and noise in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present. The first unit will consider examples ranging from blackface minstrel shows (the nineteenth-century nation’s most popular form of entertainment)... 
The recent history of New York City is one of crisis, resilience, and rebirth. From the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the devastation of the pandemic, New Yorkers have experienced tragedy and reinvented their city in its aftermath. This is a cycle with a deeper history: in this course we will focus on how New York City reinvented itself in the Seventies and Eighties. On October 16, 1975, New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy. With nearly five hundred million dollars of debt due the next day and only thirty-four million in its bank, catastrophe seemed inevitable. Fortunately, the city was able to raise funds and avoid bankruptcy. Nevertheless, New York City was and had been a space on fire... 
Magic had long been an integral part of how people made sense of the world around them, but between 1450 and 1750 some 80 to 100,000 people (mostly women) were executed under charges of witchcraft in western Europe alone. During the same period, a literal witch hunt threatened the lives of elderly or widowed women, peasants, Indigenous healers, and West African Muslims. In this course we will explore what magic and witchcraft meant and how the charge of witchcraft came to be so deadly in western Europe, North America, colonial Latin America, the Caribbean, and West Africa in the world before 1800. Such fears of witchcraft might seem odd or alien to us now, but understanding witch hunts... 
In this seminar, we will think together about education as a site of radical imagination, turning to learning spaces from the 20th century to the present where people have envisioned and attempted to bring about different worlds. Major topics of the course will include: education and social change, critical pedagogy, the imagination, abolition, and worldbuilding. Beginning in the 1920s, we will look at Black Mountain College, Highlander Folk School, and the Modern Schools alongside thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ella Baker who connected education to the practice of freedom. We will then turn to educational experiments in the 1950s to 1970s—Freedom Schools, the Black Panthers’ schools, and free universities—that were part of the Civil... 
What does Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny have to do with 16th century Mexico criminal archives? What does the Netflix series Pose (2018) have to do with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)? They converge in the queer borderlands, Chicana lesbian Gloria Anzaldúa’s spatial framework. Just as border studies has taught us that such encounters and crossroads exist far beyond literal borders, so too does this course delink from any geographical space, instead deploying Anzaldúa’s framework to provide an account for two major arcs while centering gender and sexual non/normativity. First, how the competing Latin American and North American ideas about race have shaped Latinx communities since Spanish colonialism... 
Far-right movements have, in recent years, gained striking momentum across Europe. From France’s anti-immigrant National Front and neo-Nazis in Germany to efforts to rehabilitate Franco and Mussolini in Spain and Italy, forces of extreme nationalism, xenophobia, and imperial nostalgia have increased in prominence as well as popularity. The current moment is not the first time that the continent has experienced a rise in right-wing extremism. Fascism, from the 1920s onward, offered violent, totalitarian solutions to the tensions of mass politics and populist resentment in polarized societies. How do today’s reactionary political formations relate to their fascistic forebears? What social and cultural dynamics is each responding to, and, perhaps just as significantly, what historical legacies... 
As we face resurgent authoritarianism around the world, culture remains a critical tool of resistance against the perils of dictatorship and its legacies. Latin America’s long history of tyranny, repression, and impunity reveals that—in national traditions where fiction has often addressed either explicitly or allegorically what journalism did or could not—culture has mediated moments of historical trauma as countries grapple with the consequences of state terrorism and general instability. In this seminar, we will focus on the military dictatorships that swept the Southern Cone in the 1970s and their aftermaths to reflect on the role of cultural resistance in keeping democracy alive and ensuring human rights abuses... 
Muslims first arrived on the shores of the Americas at the turn of the sixteenth century, yet their long history in the western hemisphere has been largely forgotten. For centuries Islam was the second-most widely practiced monotheistic religion in the Americas, after Catholicism; some Muslims came from Spain to escape persecution at the hands of the Inquisition for continuing to practice their religion, while others were taken captive and forcibly crammed into the hulls of ships on the West African coast and transported across the Atlantic, where, in 1522, they participated in the first uprising of enslaved men and women in the Americas on a sugar plantation on the island of Hispaniola (the site of present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). From the very beginning of European... 
Traditionally, the postwar American road narrative has been associated with figures like Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, and seen as representing a modern libertinism inseparable from white privilege and angst. As we will see in this seminar, white male writers and drivers do not have a monopoly on the road; it has also been a powerful element of storytelling for writers of color. The imagery and experience of the road assume very different meanings for different people; what is an opportunity for carefree adventure for one person is a source of precarity for another. Looking at works such as Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), Misha Green’s 2020 adaptation of Lovecraft Country for HBO, and contemporary music... 
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” Viet Thanh Nguyen has argued. In this seminar, we will challenge how the Vietnam War is remembered in the United States by focusing on the work of Asian Americans and the Southeast Asian diaspora. From the 1960s onward, the American perspective and the figure of the white American soldier have dominated the history of and the imagination surrounding the Vietnam War. As a result, the experiences of the Vietnamese, and of Southeast Asia and Asian America more broadly, have been pushed to the periphery. This seminar brings them back front and center. Reading a range of texts and artwork, we will study the various narratives of war, refugees, and the diaspora and will place the... 
In this seminar, we will consider the literary and cultural history of American museums from the eighteenth century to the present. How have museums prompted broader discussions about taste, expertise, and authority? How can we understand the legacies of historical collecting practices for contemporary institutions? And how have recent debates about decolonization, repatriation, and accessibility informed new ideas about what role museums can play in American culture? Throughout the semester, we will examine a range of sources, from fiction, museum catalogues, and periodicals to paintings, artifacts, and installations; we will also research objects in Harvard’s museum collections and develop a collaborative digital exhibit. 
Pests have had impacts large and small on human life, serving as sources of lethal pandemics and minor annoyance alike. But what constitutes a pest has varied greatly over time and space. This course examines these themes with a focus on the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, an era of optimism for pest eradication and visions of environmental control more broadly. It subsequently turns to the consequences of these efforts--both life-saving and deleterious--to the present. Throughout, the course contextualizes pests as products of sedentary agriculture, empire, and capitalism. Topics include mosquitoes and revolution in Haiti, street dogs and health in Istanbul, and rats and race in Baltimore. The course also touches on the broader cultural resonance of pests, by attending...