Section 01: Chicago Black Renaissance
Taught by: Jeanne Petrolle (English and Creative Writing)
Tuesdays 9:00-11:50 am, 618, #207
The Chicago Black Renaissance--an upsurge of artistic, commercial, and political productivity in the late 1910s and 20s, was focused in Bronzeville, a vibrant neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side named for the beautiful bronze-like tones of darker skin. Writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Walker strolled South Parkway Avenue--now called Martin Luther King Junior Boulevard--taking inspiration from the place and people of this neighborhood. Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Eddie Condon, and Louis Armstrong played the Savoy Ballroom, at South Parkway and 47th. Near the Savoy, the architecturally ornate Regal Theater provided black artists and audiences a magnificent venue for cinema and stage performance. Black journalists founded The Chicago Whip and the Chicago Defender, newspapers to serve and celebrate the Black community. Black modernist painter Archibald Motley, who graduated from the School of the Art Institute in the 1910s, captured the vitality of jazz-era Bronzeville on canvas. As the Renaissance blossomed into the 1930s and 40s, W.E.B. Dubois commented that Chicago had produced a “different kind of Youth,” meaning that the Bronzeville Writers, who emerged from the South Side Writers Group, had produced a new, distinctively Black “aesthetic consciousness” that challenged white supremacist narratives and contested white power. In this course, while practicing the power of creative community ourselves, we will learn the history of Chicago’s Black Renaissance and explore the distinctively Black aesthetic consciousness of the Bronzeville writers.
Section 02: American Prisons
Taught by: Teresa Prados-Torreira (Humanities, History, and Social Sciences)
Thursdays 12:30-3:20 pm, 618, #207
This class will examine why and how the United States relies on mass detention as a strategy to impose order, and how the current judicial system has relegated millions of poor people to a second-class status. Why is the U.S. one of the most punitive countries in the world? Who gets punished? What are the lives of incarcerated people like? Ultimately, we will explore the question: Can we imagine an alternative to the current system? Students will draw on their own interests and skills to investigate and understand global and local issues through the lens of mass incarceration. They will be exposed to and connect with Chicago creative communities engaged in developing new solutions to address this social problem.
Section 03: Latino Voices
Taught by: Elio Leturia (Communication)
Thursdays 3:30-6:20pm, 618, #207
In this course, students will learn about the wide range of life stories of Latino communities in the city. Hispanics and Latinos make up the largest minority group in the United States and their stories are of great importance because they have been part of the American landscape for centuries. Nevertheless, these stories continue being overlooked or told by others who lack the understanding of this multiethnic community whose roots come from many Latin American countries in North, Central and South America. By taking this course, students will learn about the narrative nature of Hispanic/Latino life experiences by inquiring, learning, and explaining their histories (identifying similarities and differences) thus avoiding perpetuating stereotypes. Throughout the course, students will explore diverse communities in which Latinos across Chicago live, create, and participate. Students will also engage in discussing issues of immigration, advocacy, language, religion, culture, ethnic background, class, and the advancement for racial equity and social change. As collaborative work is an essential component of this class, students will work in groups to discuss practices and content and to develop their final group presentations.
Section 04: Storytelling Through Grief
Taught by: Suzanne McBride (Communication)
Mondays 3:30-6:20 pm, 618, #LL01
This course focuses on stories people tell about themselves and others as they grieve different kinds of loss. By collecting, analyzing, and creating stories, students will develop a sharper understanding of how and why people use stories to make sense of their lives. Students will produce stories about various aspects of grief and establish connections between these varied experiences. Through the process of discovering, understanding, and relaying narratives, students will establish deeper ties with their own communities at the college and in the city.
Section 05: Unsung Heroines
Taught by: Gabriela Diaz de Sabates (Humanities, History, and Social Sciences)
Tuesdays 3:30-6:20pm, 618, #LL01
In this course students will learn about the wide range of women’s life stories in the Chicago metropolitan area and beyond, establishing connections between the local and the global. Women’s life stories are of importance because they invent, reform, and refashion personal and collective identity. By taking this course, students will learn about the narrative nature of life experiences by exploring the process of knowing about, listening, and telling of life stories. This class uses an intersectional approach, which takes into consideration markers of identity such as gender, sexual identity, class, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, etc. Throughout the class, students will be exposed to communities of interest, practice and/or purpose that Chicago women inhabit, create, and participate in, while exploring the relationships among their stories embedded within creative ecosystems, discussing issues of advocacy and the advancement for gender equity and social change. It is important to note that, in this class, the term “woman" is not understood as a concept based on essentialist and narrow notions rooted in biology, but rather as one that is inclusive of all persons who identify as women, in the broadest sense.
Section 06: Unsettling Chicago
Taught by: C. Richard King (Humanities, History, and Social Sciences)
Thursdays 9-11:50am, 618, #LL02
Unsettling Chicago concerns itself with the place of imagined Indians in Chicago and the distinct representational practices and cultural politics that have made such renderings pleasurable, profitable, and powerful. Place names and origins stories, collective memory and commercial brands, as well as sports mascots and holiday celebrations will be examined. Readings and discussion seek not simply to catalog a set of stereotypes but encourage a deeper understanding of the construction and circulation of such representations and a fuller appreciation of the cultural, historical, and political forces shaping the uses and understandings of Indianness. Throughout, attention will be directed at the shifting contours of race, power, and identity as well as the persistence and fecundity of core ideas about indigenous peoples.