English 180/280
Special Topics: Activating the Local
Thursdays, 2:30-5Juliana Spahr
Mills Hall 315, office hours: Tuesdays 10-11:30 amWhat responsibilities do writers and artists have as activists? As residents of places such as Oakland and students at Mills? How do writers and artists engage with the public--and just what is that thing we call "the public"?--and local communities? This course will be a survey of literature and art that engages with local communities in order to affect positive change. We will look at the places where boundaries between the creative and the critical get very productively confused. Emphasis will be placed on creative thinking, collaborative enterprise, research, and the creation of writing that respects local--rather than international or global--aesthetics, ecological, and cultural values. We will discuss Oakland's complicated history and consider how we might create exemplary works that retell often overlooked local histories.
The course will feature a series of guest speakers, including both Mills faculty and visiting writers/artists who will be on campus next spring as part of an Irvine funded series of multi-cultural and interdisciplinary fine arts programming called "Art and Activism: Activating the Local, Peforming the Local."
Course assignments will encourage students to initiate and participate in a cumulative community-based event (we will discuss this in class, but possibilities include a campus wide performance). Part of the class will involve creative planning sessions and collaboration with other students and faculty, as well as with community members. Advanced study in literature is not necessary for this course and non-English majors are more than welcome.
In addition to class, your attendance is assumed at the majority of these events:
JANUARY 27, Mills Art Museum, 7:00-8:30
CODE 33 Revisited: a performance and talk with Suzanne Lacy, Unique Holland, and Julio Morales
and
projected on the museum's outside walls: CITY OF DREAMS, digital slide projection show by OAKLANDISHFEBRUARY 24, Mills Hall Living Room, 7:00-8:30
Heriberto YèpezMARCH 8, Mills Hall Living Room, 5:30-7:00
Jena OsmanMARCH 17, Mills Hall Living Room, 7:00-8:30
Gaye Chan and Nandita SharmaAPRIL 14, place and time t.b.a
The Yes Men
APRIL 12, Mills Hall Living Room, 5:30-7:00
Cecilia Vicuña
parameters . . .Because this course has a series of guest speakers, it has a variable and complicated structure. Basically, there are two types of writing that are required:
1. a series of conversational and casual responses about some books, some websites, and the work of the guest speakers. (You are expected to do a total of TEN of these responses this semester.)
and
2. a series of more crafted creative and/or critical responses where you enact some of the ideas we've been discussing about localism and/or activism.
how to do #1, the conversational and casual responses to speakers and/or readings . . .All responses should be about 500-1000 words (about one to two single spaced pages).
All of these responses should be posted on the blog, http://activatingthelocal.squarespace.com.
You should read everyone else's posts each week. Please try at least several times in the semester to engage the ideas of your peers directly in these posts. We will not have a lot of time for in class discussion so this forum is meant to supplement class time.
There are two sorts of responses…
A. speaker responses.
January 27, February 24, March 8, March 17, April 14, and April 12.You should post a response about the work of the visiting speakers in the "responses to speakers and/or readings" section of blog no later than midnight of two days after the event. (I don't mind if you decide to post after the class visit, but please come prepared with questions for the guests if you do this!) These posts might be full of forward thinking (questions you might have for the visitors before they arrive). Or of reverse thinking (issues you saw raised the previous week that are relevant to your thinking and/or interesting). Please reference the speaker's name in the category section of your post.
I have deliberately kept the reading for this class light with the assumption that you will be attending evening events instead of reading books. However, I understand that you might have evening commitments during some of these events. In that case you may make up a missed event with supplemental reading and blog post. Choose one of the books off those on reserve, read it, write up an additional blog post on it (so for one week, you'll have two blog posts, one on the work of the visitor/s (but not their talk) and one on a book unrelated to the visitor/s). In your post, clearly identify it as a make up post.
B. reading responses.
You will also during the semester post responses on at least three books or articles and one website. There aren't a lot of rules about these. Just show me that you did some reading in your response.However, I think these will be more useful and less annoying to you if you do less a summary of the book and talk more about how you might use some of the information in the books in your work. Example: Chris Rhomberg's No There There looks at three key moments in community organization in Oakland: the Klan in the 20s, the General Strike of 46, and the Panthers in the 70s. If I had to write a response to it, I might talk about a possible project or so that I could see doing that were stimulated by reading his work. For instance, Rhomberg talks about how into the 60s, the Oakland Tribune didn't allow the use of the words "slum" or "ghetto" to describe neighborhoods in Oakland. I could in my response talk about some projects that I could see doing that would explore both the origin of these words and then how these words get used about Oakland. And then I might move from there to a describing a project that I might do around forbidden words, etc.
This work is 1/3 of your grade. It is graded on a nonevaluative completion basis. I will inform you if you are not getting credit because your responses are not meeting minimum standards. Otherwise, you can assume you've gotten credit for the assignment and can at any point in the semester figure out this part of your grade on your own.
sometime over first four weeks read at least one of the following:
Ishmael Reed, Blues City: A Walk in Oakland
Chris Rohmberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland
Robert O Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oaklandand read around in (at least a few articles if not the whole book) at least one of the following:
Stephen Duncombe, Cultural Resistance Reader
Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology
Miwon Kwon, One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity
Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society
Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: texts and documents
George McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty, Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties
Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette, ed. The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Lifebefore April 7, read at least one of the following:
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands=La Frontera
Kamau Brathwaite, Trench Town Rock
Brenda Coultas, A Handmade Museum
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red Times Square Blue
Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Dangerous border crossers: the artist talks back OR Warrior for gringostroika: essays, performance texts, and poetry
Mark Nowak, Shut Up Shut Down
Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (on reserve in The best plays of 1993-1994)and read/view at least one of the following:
Ask Me for the Moon: Working Nights in Waik?k?, by John Zuern, www2.hawaii.edu/~zuern/ask/ask.html
Black Panther Legacy Tours, www.blackpanthertours.com
Center for Land Use Interpretation, www.clui.org
Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge, by Phil Ethington, cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/LAPUHK/
Public Smog, www.publicsmog.org
any of the projects at RTMark, www.rtmark.com
This is the Public Domain, www.thisisthepublicdomain.org
WTO/GATT, www.gatt.org
how to do # 2, the critical and/or creative enactments . . .These should also be posted on the blog under the category of "creative and/or critical enactments" before class on the day they are due. They should be about 1000-3000 words.
Your response can be in any genre. It just should somehow be related to some of the issues in the class. It just needs to somehow be represented by type (so if you want to work with a non-paper media/genre, come up with some way to represent what you will do on paper/the computer screen). These might be maps with commentary, essays, scores for a performance/musical piece, notes for a web project or an actual web project, a description of a conceptual art piece, a story board for a film, a film script, a short one act play, a tour guide, memoir, confession . . .
Some possible examples using the reserve reading as model… a sociologically driven poem about various labor moments in Oakland (Mark Nowak's Shut Up Shut Down as example). Or a personal essay about various neighborhoods in which you have lived in Oakland and what that tells us about race and class issues (Samuel Delany's Times Square Red Times Square Blue or Kamau Brathwaite's Trench Town Rock). Or a map for a tour of various key moments in Oakland history (the Black Panther tour map). Or a play using people's memories/voices (Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992). Or an essay or a performance that enacts the complications around various borders by being multigenred and/or multilingual (Anzaldua's Borderlands=La Frontera or Guillermo Gomez-Peña's performances).
The only requirement is that they need to be somehow addressing issues of localism and/or activism. But narrow definitions of those terms are not required. You've got a lot of room here to be as creative or analytical or both as you desire.
These assignments are 1/3 of your grade. If you are an undergraduate, it is graded using evaluative criteria. You turn it into me, I give you a grade on it. Every day it is late, it goes down a faction of a letter grade (A to A-). If you are a graduate, it is graded nonevaluatively.
CREATIVE AND/OR CRITICAL ENACTMENT # ONE, due February 10:Two rules:
1. Create something that somehow comments on Oakland.
2. Use and clearly identify a source. The Reed, Self, and Rhomberg books might be the easiest reference here but you could also use newspaper articles, sociological studies, etc.
CREATIVE AND/OR CRITICAL ENACTMENT # TWO, due February 17:
A piece of work that uses the Oakland Living History Program archive as a source text. Or collect your own oral history about a place, your history or someone else's. Question: How can you make the source of this assignment your own? How can you engage with other's words ethically and yet interestingly?
CREATIVE AND/OR CRITICAL ENACTMENT # THREE, due April 14
It is nearing the end of the semester, you should have looked at/thought about a lot of examples. Do something interesting. You might want to consider this as a first draft of a final project, if you are doing one.
final projects . . .If you do the final performance, then this counts as your final project. You should just turn into me a one to two page explanation of what you did and how you thought it went.
If you/we decide not to do the final performance…
If you are an undergraduate student, 5-6 pages on something related to the class. This can be a reworking of a previous assignment. This work is 1/3 of your grade. It is graded using evaluative criteria. You turn it into me, I give you a grade on it. Every day it is late, it goes down a faction of a letter grade (A to A-).If you are a graduate student, you should turn into me an expanded version of this. Again, the genre is wide open. But there should be some sort of scholarly research evident. So quote some sources. Include a works cited.
NOTE: If you are interested in working with the oral history archives for a final project, there is a chance you can get funding for this from the Irvine Foundation. Undergraduates should apply for funding from the Undergraduate Research Council. Next deadline: February 18 and April 1 (depends on the grant). (See…http://www.mills.edu/PROV/AwardsandFellowships/grants_researchopportunitiesforstudents.html)
Graduates may write up a persuasive proposal and contact Andy Workman with it.
books . . .
The following books have been ordered at the Mills College bookstore. Please note that you do not need to purchase all of them. In fact the only ones that are required for this class are the Historic Waik?k? souvenirs and the Heriberto Yèpez book.Most of these books are also on reserve at the library. Those not on reserve are on order. They may or may not arrive in time.
Chan, Gaye and Nandita Sharma, Historic Waik?k? souvenirs (4-pk)Brenda Coultas, A Handmade Museum
Coffee House Press, ISBN: 1566891434Samuel Delany, Times Square Red Times Square Blue
New York University Press, ISBN: 0814719201Stephen Duncombe, Cultural Resistance Reader
Verso, ISBN: 1859843794Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society
New Press, ISBN: 1565842480George McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty, Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties
Verso, ISBN: 1859840280Mark Nowak, Shut Up Shut Down
Coffee House Press, ISBN: 1566891639Ishmael Reed, Blues City: A Walk in Oakland
Crown, ISBN: 1400045401Chris Rohmberg, No There There: Race, Class, and Political Community in Oakland
University of California Press, ISBN: 0520236181Robert O Self, American Babylon : Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
Princeton University Press, ISBN: 0691070261Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette, ed. The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life MIT Press, ISBN: 0-262-20150-X
Heriberto Yèpez , Babellebab. Non-Poetry on the End of Translation.
Duration Press
reserve reading on ereserves . . .To access . . .
go to http://minerva.mills.edu
choose "reserves by faculty"
enter spahr in the box
choose english280
the password is eng180-s05The following are on ereserve (and designated as such on the syllabus):
"Babellebab." Yepez, Heriberto.
"Clearing the air: Code 33." Wilson, Megan.
"Contexts and signs in an urban visual poetics." Yepez, Heriberto.
"An encyclopedia of lost thoughts (a short novel)." Yepez, Heriberto.
"Suzanne Lacy interview: art and advocacy." Lacy, Suzanne.
"A ten-step program (or a user's guide) on how Mexicans and Americans can know they have a body." Yepez, Heriberto.
"Text, lies, and role playing (translation as mother tongue)." Yepez, Heriberto.
"Translation as matricide (the sequel!)." Yepez, Heriberto.
"What about the Mexican poetry scene?" Yepez, Heriberto.
probable syllabus . . .
January 20
introduction
January 27
class visit:
Suzanne Lacy, Unique Holland, and Julio Moralesto read:
Lacy, Suzanne, interviewed by Moira Roth, on-line transcript, Archives of American Art, http://archivesofamericanart.si.edu/oralhist/lacy90.htm
hand outs provided by Suzanne Lacyrecommended:
Lacy, Suzanne, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art
Megan Wilson, "Clearing the Air: Code 33" [ereserve]
Suzanne Lacy, Artist Resource Site, http://www.suzannelacy.com/index.htm
"Art and Advocacy," an Interview with Suzanne Lacy [ereserve]
February 2
class visit:
Oaklandishto read/view:
Black Panther tour, http://www.blackpanthertours.com/tour_map.html
Oaklandish, http://www.oaklandish.org/what.html
February 10
class visit:
Nancy McKay and Andy Workmanassignment one due
at least two responses to reserve reading due on the blog
February 17
class visit:
Jose Palafoxto read and/or listen:
an oral history or two from the Oakland Living History Program, http://www.mills.edu/OLHP/index.html
February 24
class visit:
Heriberto Yèpezto read (you can just read a couple of these but all of them are interesting!):
Babellebab. Non-Poetry on the End of Translation."A Ten Step Program (or a User's Guide) on How Mexicans and Americans Can Know They Have a Body," [ereserve]
"Clock Woman in the Land of Mixed Feelings: the Place of Maria Sabina in Mexican Culture"
"A Sketch on Ethnopoetics and Globalization"
"Translation as Matricide (The Sequel!!!)" [ereserve]
"Dirty Political Technologies (the countdowns) or An Essay on Readings (An E-Play). Choose the title that best fits you" [ereserve]
"Babellebab" [ereserve]
"What about the Mexican Poetry Scene?" [ereserve]
"Text, Lies and Role-Playing (Translation as Mother Tongue)" [ereserve]
"An Encyclopedia of Lost Thoughts" [ereserve]
"Contexts and Signs of an Urban Visual Poetics" [ereserve]
March 3
assignment two due
March 10
class visit:
Jenny Lionto read:
t.b.a.
March 17
class visit:
Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharmato read/view:
Historic Waik?k?, http://www.downwindproductions.com
Historic Waik?k? souvenirs (4-pk)
"Eating in Public," http://www.nomoola.com/diggersrecommended:
Dennis Kawaharada, "Local Mythologies" [ereserve]
March 24
t.b.a.
March 31
spring break
April 7
project three due
final two reading/viewing responses due
April 14
the Yes Men
April 21, and 28
plan event; workshop final projects