Amanda Loos, Assistant Professor

Course Introduction

What does citizenship mean to you? What are the rights and responsibilities of citizens? “Good citizens”? Who has the power to grant these rights…or deny them? Take them away? Abuse them? Which communities, which people, whose children are most vulnerable to these abuses and manipulations? How can/do the power structures that be use citizenship – the promise, the privileges, and the deprivation of them – to maintain the social/economic status quo and justify the larger operations of the State, inside, outside, and across global borders?

As an interdisciplinary introduction to the arts, this course will explore 8 major art forms – visual art, sculpture, architecture, music, dance, literature, theatre, and film – critically analyzing questions of citizenship along with these voices. We will will follow this theme of “citizens” – primarily from the perspectives of those whose citizenship has been denied, questioned, challenged, precariously balanced, undocumented, disrespected, advocated for, actively fought-for, or hard-won.

Our course theme is inspired by/aligned with the world-renowned Chicago Humanities Festival this Fall. Class sessions will be taught using anti-racist, feminist, and social justice pedagogies as much as possible, with a lot of discussion, and live experiences of the arts.

So don’t give me your tenets and your laws. Don’t give me your lukewarm gods. What I want is an accounting with all three cultures – white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture – una cultura mestiza – with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture(Gloria Anzaldúa, La Frontera/Borderlands 44).