PERSONAL RACE/IMMIGRATION NARRATIVE. 2-3 pages, MLA Format: 12pt Times New Roman,
double spaced, 1” margins, and page numbers.
In this first assignment, you’ll write about and reflect upon an experience
that reveals something important about your racial identity. If you emigrated
to this country, you can choose to write about that experience. If not, you
can reach back to your ancestors’ experiences and discuss how their decisions
to emigrate have impacted you. Alternatively, you can write about your racial
identity without referring directly (or even indirectly) to family histories
of emigration. Instead, you can choose to write about a life event, a memory,
an encounter, etc. where your self-awareness about race, and about your
racial identity, were raised. For this assignment, then, I’m asking you to
produce a critical narrative: describe a key racial experience, and then
reflect upon the experience: why was this event or encounter important to
you? How does it describe something meaningful or significant about how you
identify racially, and about how race functions socially? How does your
racial history shape who you are as an individual and illuminate important
dimensions of your personality? You will upload your narrative to
Turnitin.com on Sunday, October 4 by 5 PM.
LITERARY ANALYSIS ESSAY. 4-5 pages. MLA Format: 12pt Times New Roman, double
spaced, 1” margins, and page numbers.
This assignment asks you to develop a thesis-driven argument about a primary
text covered in class (Adichie’s Americanah or Lee’s Native Speaker) using
two secondary texts also covered in class (there are several options:
Mukherjee, Morrison, Omi and Winant, McIntosh, Fanon, Hall, Mbembe, Wa
Thiong’o, Gilroy, Chang, Nguyen, Cheng, Lowe, Lye, and so on). Essentially,
I’m asking you to identify and select individual terms and concepts developed
in the secondary material, and to use these terms and concepts to interpret
Americanah or Native Speaker. This is a close-reading assignment, which means
you will use your chosen critical terms and concepts to analyze several
passages from the primary text. You will also select specific passages from
the secondary material, and quote directly from it. Your overall objective is
to develop a strong reading of racial issues/identity in either Americanah or
Native Speaker by “reading” the primary text through the lens of our
secondary critical race material. Doing so, you will hopefully arrive at a
much deeper understanding of how these novels understand and represent issues
of racial identity formation, immigrant citizenship, etc.
CRITICAL RACE/IMMIGRATION ESSAY. 7-8 pages. MLA Format: 12pt Times New Roman,
double spaced, 1” margins, and page numbers. For this essay, you will also
produce an Annotated Bibliography.
In this research-based thesis-driven essay, you will begin by choosing an
object that meditates on the theme of immigration. This might be a piece of
creative work -- a novel or a poem; a short story or film; a game or visual
art object --, but it might also be something else -- an ongoing immigration
topic delimited by nation (for instance the US/Mexico border debate);
legislation pertaining to some aspect of immigration law, contemporary or
historical (a case or set of cases); a presidential or ambassadorial speech,
video, or piece of writing dealing with immigration.
Once you’ve chosen your object, you will begin by identifying your specific
analytical approach to it, and, from there, you will begin to formulate a
thesis that accommodates this approach. For instance, if you choose to take a
historical approach to the legal case, United States Versus Bhagat Singh III
(1923), then you might begin by placing the case in the fuller context of
Indian-American immigration to the US. Alternatively, if you decide to take a
literary-critical approach to US vs. Singh, you could explore how the case
reinforces or challenges specific terms and concepts from the secondary
critical material on race studied throughout the quarter. If you decide to
study a creative object, such as Jim Sheridan’s award-winning film about
Irish-American immigrant experience, In America, you could also choose a
historical approach by elaborating the legal and cultural history of Irish
immigration to the US. Or you could approach In America in literary-critical
fashion, by working with secondary critical race material in order to
elaborate a claim or set of claims about how the film represents US attitudes
toward Irish immigrants and/or how it constructs Irish-American racial
identity.
Once you’ve settled on your approach, you can begin to develop a working
thesis. Your thesis is an argument. It is the major “point” or “takeaway” of
your essay. As such, your thesis also needs to be contestable. You can’t, for
instance, simply suggest in your analysis of US versus Singh that the case
demonstrates that US legal systems expressed a discriminatory bias toward a
nonwhite immigrant. You need to develop such a thesis, either through a
historical or a literary-critical approach, to say something about how and
why the case illustrates specific kinds of racial bias. To this end, you will
need to analyze your chosen object in detail: think about why your object
describes or imagines immigrant experience, immigrant character, race, the
limits of legal citizenship, etc. in the way it does. Think about how and in
what ways your object carries implications for how racial identity formation
and the status of the immigrant are understood in a broader sense.
In order to conduct your analysis and develop your thesis you’ll need to
perform research. This research will not only help you to work through your
thesis, it will also lend appropriate weight and meaning to your claims. If
you’re taking a historical approach to a given object, for instance, your
research may include direct historical accounts and credible academic
interpretations of historical events. By contrast, if you choose to take a
literary-critical approach to a given object, you’ll need to identify key
scholars and critics who’ve dealt not only with your particular object (the
film, text, game), but also those critics and scholars who’ve dealt with the
broader issues you’re engaging re: race and immigration (note: we will have
touched on many important critics in the course, but there are many, many
more who warrant your attention). As you develop a working thesis, you’ll
want to take stock of these critics and their arguments: use their terms and
concepts to set up your own claims about your chosen object. The research you
perform will be MLA- cited in your essay, but it will also be indexed in your
Annotated Bibliography.