Who do you think you are? Identity in history.
Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 6:15-8:15
Class text: Course reader
Instructors: Jillian Slaight, Kayci Harris, Isaac Lee
Course description
What makes you distinctly ‘you’? This course investigates the ways that race, sex, status, religion, and nationality have shaped how people see themselves throughout history. Sometimes these aspects of identity have helped people forge bonds or establish belonging; other times, these aspects of identity have constrained or alienated them. We will trace the history of identity through a series of individuals or groups who defined themselves unconventionally or challenged other people’s assumptions about themselves. They will include the following (among others): a peasant who tricked an entire town into thinking he was another man; a nun-in-training who traveled dressed as a man throughout Latin America; mixed race Americans who ‘passed’ as whites in the era of slavery; and a resistance fighter who assumed various roles to fool her Nazi enemies.
Attendance
You’ve signed up for a full 8 weeks. We ask you to come to every class that you can make. If you can’t come, please follow the syllabus and ask somebody to fill you in on anything you missed. Please be aware that if you miss any two classes, your name will have to be removed from the roster, and you’ll have to wait until the next session starts up to join a class again.
Readings
You will be able to sign out class texts for the next 8 weeks. The readers are now the property of Oakhill Correctional Institution. They will be available to you for the 8 weeks of the class but will be collected after the session. No student not currently enrolled in the class should be in possession of the books or readings. Please treat them well; we want to make sure they last for others. If you end up being transferred or not completing the class for some reason, please return the materials to the School Office.
Instructors
Jennifer Gramer, Isaac Lee, Meghan O’Donnell, James Mckay, Kayci Harris, Benjamin Shannon, Jillian Slaight, Leah Webb-Halpern
Class schedule
Note: come to class having read the materials listed underneath the class number.
Class #1 – Week of June 24
“Introduction” and excerpts from Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1984).
Rachel Aviv, “How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity,” The New Yorker, April 2, 2018.
Class #2 – Week of July 1
Excerpts from Catalina de Erauso, Memoir of a Basque Lieutenant Nun Transvestite in the New World, trans. Michele Stepto & Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
Class #3 – Week of July 8
Excerpts from Robert J. Allison, ed. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself with Related Documents (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2007).
Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano: African British abolitionist and founder of the African American slave narrative,” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative (2007), 44-60.
James Sweet, “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review 114 (2009), 279-306.
Class #4 – Week of July 15
Chapters 1 and 4 of Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Ann Morning, “Race and Rachel Dolezal,” Contexts 16 (2017), 8-11.
Class #5 – Week of July 22
Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics and Social Welfare in New Deal Minnesota” in P. A. Lombardo, ed., Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (OUP: 2008), 117-136.
E. Ehrenreich, “Making the Ancestral Proof in Nazi Germany,” in Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (2007). 58-70.
Excerpts from A. Rabinback and S. L. Gilman, The Third Reich Sourcebook (2013).
Ruth Padawer, “Sigrid Johnson Was Black. A DNA Test Said She Wasn’t,” New York Times, November 19, 2018.
Class #6 – Week of July 29
“Introduction” and excerpts from Lucie Aubrac, Outwitting the Gestapo, trans. Konrad Bieber and Betsy Wing (University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
Susan Rubin Suleiman, “History, Heroism, and Narrative Desire: The ‘Aubrac Affair’ and National Memory of the French Resistance,” South Central Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, Politics and Aesthetics of Memory (Spring 2004): 54-81.
Class #7 – Week of August 5
Excerpts from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (New York: Bantam Books, 1963).
Class #8 – Week of August 12
John W. Troutman, “Joe Shunatona and the United States Indian Reservation Orchestra,” in Berglund and Johnson, eds., Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop (University of Arizona Press, 2016).
Ned Blackhawk, “I Can Carry on from Here: The Relocation of American Indians to Los Angeles,” Wicazo Sa Review 11 (1995), 16-30.
Eva Garroutte, “If You’re Indian and You Know It (but Others Don’t): Self-Identification” in Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (University of California Press, 2003).