AMST 2001 Midterm Terms

Object of study

Something examined for what it can tell us

Source: Introduction: The Object of American Studies by Deloria and Olson

Culture

Where meanings are transmitted and transformed

Source: Introduction: The Object of American Studies by Deloria and Olson

Power

Who can define? Who is represented? Who belongs? Whose meanings circulate? What becomes institutionalized? How is it contested?

Source: Introduction: The Object of American Studies by Deloria and Olson

Relations

Structural arrangements

Source: Introduction: The Object of American Studies by Deloria and Olson

Relationships

How arrangements are lived and experienced

Source: Introduction: The Object of American Studies by Deloria and Olson

Interdisciplinary

The study, integration, and consideration of multiple different fields

Source: Introduction: The Object of American Studies by Deloria and Olson

Race

Historically produced categories of human difference, socially and materially consequential

Source: “The Ignominious Origins of American Ethnic Pluralism” by Steinberg and Episode 2 of Race: The Power of An Illusion

Racialization

Process through which people, populations, practices, and spaces acquire racial meaning

Source: “The Ignominious Origins of American Ethnic Pluralism” by Steinberg

Citizenship

Formal political status; boundary of membership

Source: “The Ignominious Origins of American Ethnic Pluralism” by Steinberg

Whiteness

Historically produced racial position tied to differential access to rights, belonging

Source: Episode 2 of Race: The Power of An Illusion

American Exceptionalism

National discourse representing U.S. as distinctively committed to freedom, democracy, equality, and historical progress

Source: Pease

Americanness/belonging

Claims about who counts as American and who receives recognition and rights

Source: “The Ignominious Origins of American Ethnic Pluralism” by Steinberg and Episode 2 of Race: The Power of An Illusion

Steinberg’s paradox

You must do everything possible to become like us, and no matter what you do, if you are not white, you will never belong to us

Embodied Resistance

Power contested through bodily action and expression

Source: No Mercy Here by Sarah Haley

Refusal

Withholding labor, compliance, deference, or demanded knowledge

Source: No Mercy Here by Sarah Haley

Cultural Politics

Struggle over meaning, representation, memory, and public perception

Source: Racial Formation in the United States by Omi and Winant

Sorrow Songs

The expressive, haunting folk music created and sung by enslaved African Americans to voice their suffering, heartbreak, and resilience

Source: “The Sorrow Songs” by W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass’ The Narrative of a Slave

Epistemological Sabotage

Refusing to explain oneself due to systems where power comes from a claim to be all-knowing

Source: No Mercy Here by Sarah Haley

American Dream

A universal promise of opportunity that often hides materially unequal access explains success/failure via the individual

Source: “The Epic of America” by James Adams

Reproductive Justice

Names three linked rights: the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to raise children in safe, healthy, sustainable communities. Accounts for what choice leaves out: experiences of

women of color, poor women whose reproduction discouraged, denigrated, or forcibly prevented.

Source: Group of Black women activists in Cairo

Reproductive Choice

Assumes society expects women to be mothers and that women already have the resources to act on the choice they’re given

Source: Reproductive Justice: An Introduction by Ross and Solinger

Racialized reproductive control

The way law, policy, medicine, and public messaging regulate who is encouraged, pressured, or prevented from having children, and who gets support in raising them, according to racial classification

Source: Reproductive Justice: An Introduction by Ross and Solinger

Respectability

Standards of conduct Black Americans used to claim recognition, which also policed Black behavior

Source: Righteous Discontent by Higginbotham

Protest art

Cultural production used as part of political struggle

Source: Tapia and Kara Walker

Embodied knowledge

Body as a site where understanding is developed and transformed

Source: Jose Torres The Boxer as Writer by Adeyinka Makinde

Masculinity

Historical, ideological process that ties manhood to race and authority

Source: Manliness and Civilization by Bederman

Color line

Racial boundary that distributes access, recognition, and privilege

Source: I Fight for a Living by Moore

Poetic praxis

Language as political action

Source: American Hunger by David Remnick

Transnational solidarity

Political identification across national and racial boundaries

Source: Jose Torres The Boxer as Writer by Adeyinka Makinde

Fight as epistemology / Epistemology of fighters

Ways of knowing produced through fighting and its demands

Source: Jose Torres The Boxer as Writer by Adeyinka Makinde