Honors Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors, are you looking for a course to fulfill your HON 203/301 requirement? Check out Professor Jesse Mumm’s December intersession course Race and Space: Claims to Land, Claims to Selves.
How do our forms of belonging to places inform our forms of belonging to each other? To be part of a ‘race’ has long meant belonging to – and therefore with – a group of people defined by ‘where they are from.’ Twentieth century Chicago codified this as neighborhoods that were segregated into racial supermajorities by state policies, market forces, and white vigilante violence. Communities, ethnicities, and ‘races’ became synonymous with specific pieces of the urban landscape: Chinese Chinatown, Mexican Pilsen, Irish Bridgeport, Black Woodlawn, and so on, but a fuller story includes native land claims, and Chicago as a site of race mixing, long before the invention of segregation. This course examines histories of inequity in the fabric of the city; at the same time looking at forms of radical resistance, place making, mutual aid, and redefining the meanings of kinship, race, gender and sexuality. You will read work by scholars in critical ethnic studies, history, law, sociology, and anthropology, balanced with memoirs, life histories, and writings by contemporary thinkers confronting racism and white supremacy today. Inhabiting place – and taking up space – on their own terms, this class explores how people have reshaped policies, color lines, and their own imaginations of who they are.
Professor Mumm’s class will be hybrid, with in-person meetings from 9:30am-11:30am from Monday-Thursday, along with async content, from November 28 to December 8.
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