A class that proposes to “introduce cultural studies” invokes a number of particular challenges. For one, rather than being located as a particular archive or collection of texts (Victorian poetry, the Postmodern novel, etc), cultural studies is a method – a way of reading generated from a diverse set of critical practices and academic disciplines. It requires asking questions not just about what we are reading, but how we are reading it and why. Secondly, cultural studies itself is a notoriously diverse approach that often varies greatly in practice and that takes its cues from humanistic and social sciences alike, making it difficult to define in any authoritative way.

This class will attempt to inhabit these difficulties while at the same time exploring the possibilities of a “cultural studies lens” as it is applied to the spaces, politics, and histories of 20th Century urban society. The modern city has a long history as a symbolic receptacle for both the specific values and historical anxieties endemic to national, democratic societies. In other cases, the city has also been seen as the physical expression of the conflicts and experiences – the speed, scale, and types of social relations – that define what it means to be “modern.” Our goal is to take up cultural studies questions in order to think about how issues of race and gender equality, tensions around capitalist production and consumption, questions of governance and authority, and problems at all scales of community and belonging are resolved or articulated through cultural representations and discourses of the city.

Our course texts may include James Baldwin’s portrait of a multi-racial New York, Another Country, D.J. Waldie’s mid-century suburban memoir, Holy Land¸ Paul Beatty’s satire of contemporary urban race narratives, White Boy Shuffle, and Samuel Delany’s investigation of Times Square sexual culture in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. We will read these texts alongside a selection of popular culture materials (CSI anyone?) and a significant sampling of complex cultural theory. We may even attempt to get out into the city of Seattle itself to ask questions about urbanism in our own contemporary moment. Besides the reading, work for the course will include short, semi-weekly reflection papers and a larger, extended research project.