2009-2010 Courses

Fall 2009: Art, Dissent, and Social Change

Winter 2010: Mixed Race in the United States

Spring 2010: Blues for Hard Times—and for All Times

Subscribe to the series on the Seattle Arts & Lectures Website.

Dates: October 14 & 28, November 11 & 18, December 9
Location: Kane Hall 220

In the decades spanning the great world wars, a call to social action swept through the artistic practices of dance, music, cinema, and the visual and literary arts. During this tumultuous period, many American artists strove for transparency and mass appeal in their work and were committed to producing art that depicted social and political issues that they deemed to be of concern to all Americans. Their mediums became a weapon for social change—a means to expose the ills and injustices of society and a catalyst to make citizens want to rise up and reshape the world. This course examines the creative processes and projects of American artists whose work challenged the status quo, exposing and interrogating practices of oppression, inequality, and corruption condoned or ignored by government.

Betsy Cooper is Associate Professor and Director of the UW Dance Program. She currently performs with Seattle Dance Project and Chamber Dance Company. Her academic research focuses on the Federal Dance Project.

Susan Casteras is Professor of Art History in the UW School of Art, where she specialized in nineteenth-century art. She served as Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art.

Mark Jenkins is a Professor in the UW School of Drama, where he directs the Professional Actors Training Program; co-founder of Seattle’s Freehold Theatre Lab Studio; and author of All Powers Necessary and Convenient, a McCarthy-era play.

Barry Witham is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the UW School of Drama. His books on the Federal Theatre Project include Uncle Sam Presents (with Tony Buttitta) and The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study.

Jennifer Bean is Associate Professor in the UW Department of Comparative Literature, where she directs the Cinema Studies program, and is author of The Play in the Machine: Gender, Genre, and the Cinema of Modernity.

Winter 2010: Mixed Race in the United States

Dates: January 6 & 20, February 3 & 17, March 3
Location: Kane Hall 220

Is it a coincidence that the first nonwhite president of the United States comes from a multiracial background? Or was his election, in fact, partially due to his mixed-race background and the idea that it somehow resonated with all Americans, regardless of race? In the twenty-first century United States, mixed-race people, from the chief executive to the family next door, seem to be everywhere. In the past twenty-five years, the period since the decriminalization of interracial marriage, the births of monoracial babies have increased 15%, while multiracial births have increased a dramatic 260%. But what do these numbers imply? Has racialized inequality changed with the surging numbers of multiracial Americans? This course will interrogate what it means to understand mixed-race identity in America, and what representations and histories of U.S. multiracialism can illustrate about changing notions of race, power, and privilege in the United States.

Ralina L. Joseph is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and an adjunct assistant professor in the departments of American Ethnic Studies and Women Studies at the University of Washington. She recently completed a book manuscript, Transcending Blackness: Reading Mixed-Race African American Representations in the Twenty-First Century, and is currently at work on her second book project, Speaking Back: How Black Women Resist Post-Identity Culture. Joseph teaches about issues of race, gender, sexuality, and the media, and is a 2009 recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Spring 2010: Blues for Hard Times—and for All Times

Dates: March 31, April 14 & 28, May 12 & 26
Location: Brechemin Auditorium, Music Building

What is the “blues,” and why has the word itself come to have such resonance within—and beyond—American culture? In this course, we will investigate many different musical manifestations of the blues. We will listen to the "blues songs" of the early twentieth century, the "classic" or "city" blues of Bessie Smith and her contemporaries, and the rural blues of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, and others. We will explore the "white man's blues" of country music, the essential role of blues in the development of jazz, and the post-World War II electric blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and its evolution into rock 'n' roll. We will study the adaptations of the blues by the Beatles and other "British invasion" bands of the 1960s, the recent "blues revival,” and even the migration of blues into the formal concert hall, as in Gershwin’s immortal "Rhapsody in Blue." We will also consider the larger significance of the "blues" as a term loaded with cultural, racial, and emotional connotations.