History repeats itself. This saying, while commonplace, elides a complex understanding of history by first assuming that "history" is a transparent and stable domain, untroubled by questions about its production, its rightful subjects, and its durability in the present.
For Fall Quarter 2008, we'll begin with a series of questions that unravel the problem of "history": What makes history? Where do we look for history? Who become subjects capable of world-historical action; and who are confined to a more limited sphere of agency? What are the costs that come with privileging an "official" archive of "authoritative" sources? And what are the political effects of using history to reflect a nation or a people?

We'll ground these questions in relation to two sets of readings. The first offers us a method for reading "history" critically. Here, we will draw upon the "keyword" methodology developed by cultural studies theorist Raymond Williams. According to Williams, keywords mark concepts that are taken for granted as having a unified, self-evident meaning; yet shifts in a keyword's usage open onto contestation and conflict. By tracing multiple and contradictory meanings, the study of
keywords focuses on social relations, power, and horizons of possibility for the present and the future. The second set of course texts is fiction that explores the history of transatlantic slavery, its representation, and its afterlife. One of the meanings the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) ascribes to "history" is its distinction from fiction; yet the fiction that we'll read fundamentally challenges the notion that what passes as "history" is sufficient for representing the past. By positioning their stories in relation to history—its sources and its subjects—these texts make claims about the uses of fiction for representing alternative histories that are often obscured within official accounts. Because the reading covers the nineteenth and twentieth century, it will offer us the occasion to shuttle through the different meanings of "history," drawing upon both Williams' gloss on history and the OED entry. Perhaps more importantly, it will also provide us with a concrete understanding of what it means to say that "race" has a history.

Building on Williams' work, one of our main objectives for the course will be to collaboratively develop an essay on "history" as a keyword. Selections from Keywords for American Cultural Studies (slavery, border, south, and modern) will provide models for constructing a keyword essay, as well as offer touchstones for the uses of history to each of these interrelated keywords. Students will be asked to: (1) contribute to a reference guide of online sources that offer context and background on each of the novels, (2) post weekly responses and peer comments to a class blog, (3) contribute to a collaborative essay on "history" through a class wiki, and (4) write a 6- to 8-page final paper that draws upon the insights developed through the two course
websites (blog and wiki).

Required Readings: Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855),
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It (1872),
William Faulkner's Go Down Moses (1940),
and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven (1987). A course pack will be available with selections from A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, as well as selections from Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldua, W.E.B. DuBois, James
Baldwin, and other critical materials.