This course will examine cultural radicalism in American thought from the Young Americans of the 1910s and the New York Intellectuals of the 1930s to the Beat poets of the 1950s and the Neo-Conservatives of the 1970s. Through figures such as Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, Meyer Schapiro, Lewis Mumford, C. Wright Mills and Dorothy Day, we will trace the rise and fall of the American avant-garde, the quest for an indigenous theory of culture, the social sources of counterculture, and the shifting meanings of the concepts “mass culture,” “consumer culture,” “kitsch,” and highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow. Among the questions we will address are: Can one be a political radical and a cultural conservative? A political conservative and a cultural radical?

Fall 2022 American Radicalism: Theory & Praxis. This course will serve as a think tank and workshop. Together, we will ask a number of theoretical questions about historical periods understood as “American,” such as revolution, abolition, reconstruction, prohibition, and racial/gender/sexual integration. We will ask questions like: What is American radicalism? What do we mean when we say those terms together, one after the other? What directions does the phrase move in throughout the history of “America,” whatever that might be? If radicalism is a product of American social and political culture, which is a composition of European political philosophy, then what if we said radical Americanism? What does that mean? Is it different? By surveying “American” history’s cultural and political artifacts, we will mine them for critical information about so-called “radical” positions as they transit through time. Included in the course readings will be revolutionary pamphlets, prohibition propaganda slogans, abolition postcards, cultural and artistic performances alongside black studies texts from W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Omise’eke Tinsley, C. Riley Snorton, Hortense Spillers, and more. The hope of this course is to use these investigations to interface more critically with our own non-academic practices. The expectation is that we will bring the things that we think about outside of the classroom—our art and technical practices, social life, and more—to bear on what we will study together. What do these concepts have to do with what we already do? We will use the city as a laboratory for our study when we can. The classroom is our space and time to compare notes. Writing assignments in the course will respond to guided questions to ask throughout as we practice and think about our study outside of the classroom. Throughout the course, our most important question will be: How do we do differently in the wake of a study on American radicalism?  

3 credits