Spring 2005

SOCS 635 (AMST)
New England and Empire: The Roots of U.S. Imperialism

Karamcheti,Indira

01/25/2005 - 05/03/2005
Tuesday 06:00 PM - 08:30 PM

Davenport Campus Center Room 2

In our study of New England, we will study works of history and literature to focus on the role this region played in the transformation of the United States from an erstwhile colony to a dominant world power. Major forces effecting this transformation have their roots in this area. Mercantile entrepreneurship, the drive of commerce and trade, such as the slave trade, the ivory trade, and the West and East Indies (China and India) trade, opened the larger world to merchants and consumers in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The sense of religious duty created universities that produced the missionaries who went to far corners of the world and brought the world back home. The vaunted mechanical and technological ingenuity of the Yankee peddler, seen in a grandiose version in the eponymous inventor of the famous Colt revolver, backed territorial expansion and insinuated New England culture into those newly acquired territories. A developing sense of racial entitlement and racial confidence legitimated expansion, into Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and what we would now call cultural imperialism. And the domestic, women-centered "parlor" culture of New England both displayed the wealth of empire and hid its existence.

We will be reading: Thomas Layton's The Voyage of the Frolic, Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins, Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy, Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Reginald Horsman's Race and Manifest Destiny, and Francis Jenning's The Creation of America. In addition, we will read and discuss selected essays, to be purchased in a photocopied packet from The Minuteman Press on Main Street, Middletown.

The class will view one movie, The Mosquito Coast, and go on two field trips, one on Saturday, February 19 to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in eastern Conn., and the other on Saturday, April 2 to the Peabody-Essex Maritime Museum in Salem, Mass. Students are expected to drive themselves to the museums; if enough students request it, the GLSP will provide van transportation at an additional cost.

This course may, by petition, count toward the humanities concentration.

Additional course fee: $30.

A syllabus for this course is available at:
Course Syllabus


Indira Karamcheti B.A., M.A., Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara) is associate professor of English and American Studies. Her teaching and research interests include postcolonial literature and theory, the literature of the South Asian diaspora, and the writing of ethnic and racial minorities in the U.S. She has written on such authors as Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Aime Cesaire. Click here for more information about Indira Karamcheti and click here for more information about her work.

ENROLLMENT INFORMATION

Consent of Instructor Required: No

Format: Seminar

Level: GLSP Credits: 3 Enrollment Limit: 18

Texts to purchase for this course:
Louisa May Alcott, EIGHT COUSINS (Penguin), Paperback

Louisa May Alcott, ROSE IN BLOOM (Penguin), Paperback

Maryse Conde, I, TITUBA, BLACK WITCH OF SALEM (Ballantine), Paperback

John Putnam Demos, THE UNREDEEMED CAPTIVE: A FAMILY STORY FROM EARLY AMERICA (Knopf/Vintage), Paperback

Elizabeth Warner for the Greater Middletown Preservation Trust, PICTORIAL HISTORY OF MIDDLETOWN (The Donning Company Publishers), Paperback

Edith Wharton, THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (Random House), Paperback

READING MATERIALS AVAILABLE AT BROAD STREET BOOKS, 45 BROAD STREET, MIDDLETOWN, 860-685-7323

PLEASE NOTE: Two course packet readings will be available at Minute Man Press, 512 Main Street, Middletown, 860/347-5700. Please Note: Course packet will not be available until after the start of class.

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