He is left to wonder, “Who are you?” Michigan is the setting for many stories of this kind - stories that involve cross-cultural encounters in which participants must seek out tools for mutual understanding. “Who in the world are you?” This is the desperate question of Anders, a character in Charles Baxter’s award-winning short story, “The Disappeared.” A Swedish engineer visiting Detroit, Anders meets a local resident who bewilders and emotionally overpowers him. Section 004 (Sheridan) Transculturation in Michigan Buck, the Indiana Jones film series, and fashion designer Telfar Clemens. Case studies include dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, Donald Duck comics, writing by Mark Twain and Pearl S. What do these stories tell us about power? How do these stories contribute to causing change? What’s the difference between overseas American military presence and American tourists on holiday? We’ll practice different storytelling forms to develop our writing skills and will also explore visual, oral, audio and digital storytelling. We’ll explore what stories get told and who gets to tell them. American presence and influence have been captured in poetry, journalism, novels, movies, comic books, vlogs, and more. This presence beyond American borders has included participation in conflicts such as the Philippine-American War and the Vietnam War aid distribution such as the Marshall Plan tourism and education. This section of RCAH 111 explores the transcultural engagement that has occurred because of the United States’ economic, political and cultural influence on other countries. Section 003 (MacDonald) Americans in/and the World Drawing primarily on short stories and novels, we will be particularly interested in what happens when different “cultures,” or ways of knowing and writing, collide, clash or mix, in a process we will call “transculturation.” In what ways, we will ask, does “culture” provide us with narratives, patterns, genres, through which we shape our experience into something meaningful? In what ways do we deploy, bend, mix these “stories”? If different kinds of stories embody different ways of knowing the world, what do each of these ways of knowing/writing/storytelling enable us to see, and what might they leave out? In what ways can certain kinds of writing or storytelling be seen as the mixing of, or struggle between, multiple systems of meaning or cultures? Possible course texts include Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and/or Art Spiegelman’s Maus. That is, we will examine the ways in which culture shapes the ways we perceive the world around us, and how we organize those perceptions into oral and written narratives – be they what we conventionally would call “stories” like personal narratives, myths or novels, or other genres like scientific, academic or philosophical writing, each with their own generic rules for the “stories” they tell. In this section of RCAH 111, we will focus on the connection between culture and “storytelling,” broadly conceived. Section 002 (Aronoff) Telling Stories: Composing Knowledges in Transcultural Contexts Aside from developing skills in recursive writing, students will consider objective, genre, and audience in writing and in the use of technology. Students gain practice in responsibly using various sources in their inquiry of the course material and individual projects on family, community, and ethnic histories. Through literature, film, essays and scholarly sources, students investigate the formation and transformation of diasporas, and investigate their own connections with the concept of diaspora. In this course, students engage the idea of transcultural contexts through an exploration of the concepts of diaspora, home, and migration, specifically as they apply to people of African descent, but also as they apply to people with German, Chinese, Irish, Indian, Jewish, and other heritages.
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