Dangerous and Intermingled II: Subaltern New York

Semester and Year	SP 2012
Course Number	IDSEM-UG1667
Section	001
Instructor	Jack Tchen
Days	Wed
Time	4:55 PM - 7:35 PM
Units	4.0
Level	U
Foundation Requirement	SOC

Notes/Restrictions

Permission of instructor required (jack.tchen@nyu.edu). Same as SCA-UA 380 002.

Description

In the world of political moralists, intermingled New York has and still represents the epitome of danger and evil about the American experiment—the public intermixture of classes, genders, races, sexualities, spiritualisms, and the-devil-knows-what-else!#? As elite Protestants created a refined European-affected “high brow” culture, they also created myriad “others”—a transgressive, lowly polyglot city of shadows, miscegenation, and impurity. The docks, the Bowery, The Five Points, Greenwich Village, LES/Loisaida, Chinatown, and Harlem were all forged against the repressed imaginings of the powerful and the distinguished. This peoples’ Gotham, this disdained intertwined underworld of music, slang, jokes, songs, stories, foodways, and marvels of people will be the focus of this advanced research seminar. Course materials will include: Wallace & Burrow’s Gotham, Burn’s documentary New York, Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, and a course reader. Research walks and visits off campus will be held during lab hours on Fridays. Students will learn how to conduct a case study using primary sources.

Syllabus

IDSEM-UG1667

Course Type

Interdisciplinary Seminars (IDSEM-UG)