Ethnic Public Intellectual

This course takes the figure of the public
intellectual as central to the history of ethnic
American experience, politics, and representation.
How have the ongoing realities of American race
relations placed particular political pressures on
ethnic American writers? And how does an author's
racialization change the stakes and status of the
production, circulation, and distribution of their
writing? Who is the ethnic writer's intended or
implied audience? The course proceeds
chronologically, starting with W.E.B. du Bois's
essays, before moving onto the New York
intellectuals (often Jewish writers whose
ethnicity has only retroactively been domesticated
as "white," such as Hannah Arendt and Lionel
Trilling), followed by novelists James Baldwin's
and Ralph Ellison's negotiation of 1960s black
nationalism, before moving into the contemporary
era of ethnic public intellectuals who
increasingly write online, across multiple
platforms, and often engage social media (Claudia
Rankine, Christina Sharpe, Junot Diaz, Viet Thanh
Nguyen, Teju Cole). Because many of these ethnic
public intellectuals write both fiction and
non-fiction, we will also juxtapose their literary
works against their more theoretical writing.

Students will engage critical race theory and
ethnic studies in two modes: not just as
theoretical lenses through which to read texts,
but also as primary texts themselves whose
rhetorical practices often incite subsequent
theoretical and institutional movements. As
students examine racialized knowledge production
as it occurs across different public mediums
(newspapers, pamphlets, magazine, manifesto,
podcasts, Twitter) and different genres (essay,
interview, blogpost, tweet), they will also
interrogate how different forms of intellectual
labor intersect with questions of race.