WGS 120 - Popular Culture: American Orientalism

 Beginning with an analysis of popular culture as a defining characteristic of America and Americans, students are ask to consider the interrelationships between popular culture; including film, literature, television, and visual cultures, and depictions of the U.S. as an “imagined community” in relation to distant, even dangerous, ‘others.’ WGS 120 takes seriously the premise that popular texts do not simply reflect already-existent ideas and beliefs about gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, culture, region, and religion, but rather play a critical role in the production of events, peoples, and places, their cultural significance and political import. Students will examine how questions of popular culture are always already questions of identity, place, politics, history, and economics. To do so, students will be introduced to the interdisciplinary study of popular culture through critical cultural studies approaches to questions of ideology and representation.

Focusing on the evolution of orientalism and its role in shaping representations of the “Middle East” in the Twentieth and Twenty-First centuries, WGS 120 will provide students with a topical examination of cultural-historical processes of islamophobia and xenophobia in the creation, dissemination, and consumption of mass, or popular representations of Muslim and Arab identities, cultures, and geographies.

 

Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) Designation: DI

Anticipated Terms Offered: Annually