In Pursuit of Community: Migration Today

In Pursuit of Community: The 20th Century African
American Migration and the Meanings of
Citizenship.

This is a course on the discourse and rhetoric of
citizenship, migration, and of the migrant. We
will begin by inquiring into the nature of
citizenship itself. This general and broad
examination will lead us to look how the idea of
citizenship came to be articulated in the U.S.
Constitution, in particular in the Fourteenth
Amendment, ratified in 1868. Central to this part
of the course will be an examination of what it
might mean that citizenship is defined as being
bound to political jurisdiction, rather than to
race, ethnicity, language, or territory. We will
then move on to our primary case study, which will
be the so-called "Great Migration" of African
Americans out of the rural South into the cities
of the North, Midwest, and West, during the middle
decades of the last century. This will begin with
a historical overview of the rise of racist
segregation in the South, followed by a discussion
of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court
case that legitimized racist law. From there, we
will study the migration itself in detail, through
reading the histories and testimonies of a select
group of migrants themselves, to see how that vast
manifestation of social change altered the United
States as such, and changed the country's
self-conception of citizenship. By looking into
the relationship between the discourse that
greeted black internal migrants, we will also be
able more profitably examine how these questions
continue to reverberate in our own time, with its
subsequent migrations. The course will conclude
with an examination of contemporary migration
discourse, centered on the United Nations General
Assembly's 2018 "Global Compact for Safe, Orderly
and Regular Migration."