BORDERS

University of California, San Diego, Warren Writing 10B

Course Description and Objectives

Warren Writing 10B is the second course in the two quarter Warren Writing sequence. The objective of this course is to continue to develop your skills as a critical reader and writer. While this course also continues the critical inquiry into relations between the individual and society in 10A, the focus of this course goes beyond issues of race and emphasizes the “intersectionality” of categories of human identity and classification, including nation, race, gender, sexuality, and class. We will explore how people been imagined by others and how they have imagined themselves in relation to these different “borders” (nation, race, gender, etc.) in particular cultural, political, and historical contexts in the US. Moreover, we will investigate the consequences of border crossing for specific groups and individuals by examining the limits and possibilities of different identity formations. Course readings offer different representations of the construction of borders and their effects on individuals. In the writing assignments, you will be asked to analyze not only the functions, implications, and impact of these borders but also your own position in relation to them. You will be asked to analyze the rhetorical strategies that different authors uses to represent the construction and impact of borders.

Objectives

• To continue to develop fluency in the discourse of academic argumentation by strengthening work with claims and grounds and introducing stakes, qualifiers, and warrants in analyzing and writing arguments.
• To become an active participant in academic discourse by spending time and effort in critically reading and writing academic argumentation in a contemporary field of study, in this case, border studies.
• To develop strategies for critical reading and writing.

Required Texts

Warren Writing 10B Reader

• Toni Morrision, “Recitatif”
• Benedict Anderson, “The Origins of National Consciousness”
• Eric Foner, “Our Monumental Mistakes” and “Who is an American”
• Michael Peter Smith and Bernadette Tarallo, “Proposition 187”
• Jorge G. Castañeda, “Mexico and California”
• Stephanie Coontz, “We Always Stood on Our Own Two Feet”
• Paula Gunn Allen, “How the West Was Really Won”
• Philip Deloria, “Introduction: American Indians and American Identities”
• Abby Ferber, “It All Comes Down to Sexuality ”
• Asian American Center, Los Angeles, “Antimiscegenation Laws”
• Jonathan Ned Katz, “The Invention of Heterosexuality”
• Glenn Omatsu, “Racism or Solidarity? Unions and Asian Immigrant Workers”
• James Loucky et al, “Immigrant Enterprise and Labor in LA”
• Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality”
• Lisa Lowe, “Work, Immigration, Gender”
• Yuri Kochiyama, “Then Came the War”
• Rita Henley Jensen, “Welfare: Exploding Stereotypes”
• Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
• Antonia Castañeda, “Language and Other Lethal Weapons”
• Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “Documented/Undocumented”
• Studs Turkel, “C. P. Ellis”
• Race Traitor Editorial, “Abolish the White Race by Any Means”
• Christine E. Sleeter, “White Silence, White Solidarity”
• Lone Star

Prompts:

Assignment 1: Personal Border-Crossing Narrative Describe a border-crossing experience you have had. Remember, this can be a geographical border or a metaphorical one. Your narrative should explore how the border was constructed, the functions and implications of the border, and the impact of this border-crossing on your perceptions regarding the reality of your relation with society. In thinking about this border crossing, make a claim about who you were at the time and describe yourself and your surroundings. Discuss what the crossing reminded you of and explore whether or not the crossing asked you to make any assumptions or draw any conclusions about something formerly unfamiliar to you. What kinds of sources did you rely on to come to those conclusions? Have your perspectives on this crossing changed since it took place? If so, how? Make sure that you give enough examples as grounds for the claims you make. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: immigration, travel, language and translation, starting college, moving to a different place, experiencing a different neighborhood. No matter which topic you choose, your writing should reflect on social relationships which somehow foreground “difference” in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, class, disability, religion, nationality, etc. Try, in making and grounding your claims about borders, to use some of the narrative techniques you saw used by Toni Morrison in “Recitatif.” (2-3 pp)

Revision Assignment 1: Rethink your border-crossing narrative, incorporating Anderson, Foner or Palumbo-Liu.

Assignment 2: Summarize the argument in Palumbo-Liu (2-3 pp)

Revision Assignment 2.

Assignment 3: Summarize an argument made about borders in Lone Star and compare/contrast it with an argument made about borders in one of the essays read thus far. Refer to a specific scene, or specific images, characters, dialogues, filmic effects, etc. to ground your claims about the film’s argument and use quotes to ground your claims about the article it (3-4 pp).

Assignment 4: Discuss the arguments made about sexuality and borders in Ferber. How is argument related to those in “Antimiscegination Laws” and in Katz? How do they similarly or differently define sexuality? How do they portray the deployment of sexuality in the maintenance of other borders? (3-4 pp).

Revision Assignment 3: Include in your revision some analysis (based on your recent readings) of how the film’s concern with sexual relationships helps to draw out the other borders issues it treats.

Revision Assignment 4.

Assignment 5: Open Borders Project: For each of the following prompt options you are asked to engage with the borders concepts we’ve been considering in a “practical” way. Whatever your relationship to the particular metaphorical or physical border you choose to work with, the goal of your assignment is the same: to think more fully about borders and your personal relationship to them and to thereby write more complexly about them. With that goal in mind, please select an experiencing/writing option below that you feel will both be doable for you (I’ll help you with that part), but also that will really stretch your personal comfort and understanding of these concepts. While with all of these options some discomfort and anxiety is probably necessary, physical danger certainly is not. So, if you are going to a new location or if you are interacting very differently in a familiar location, please be sure to be physically safe. Some collaborative work will be possible with some of these options in part to help with that.

• Mapping Invisible Borders: Choose a complex, high-traffic section of the campus (like a cafeteria, the Grove, RIMAC, a hall in a dorm) or of your neighborhood which you feel represents a space of interaction across borders, both obvious and less obvious. Observe this location taking field notes regarding the kinds of exchanges, conflicts, and silences happening with respect to borders. Take notes as you talk with those interacting (or not interacting) in this area about how they choose their interactions, how they identify differently or similarly to those around them, etc. You might also consider talking with a university/local government representative about the history of the construction of this meeting space. Next, find a way to map physically/visually the borderland you consider, the complexities of the borders crossed, and the kinds of interactions maintaining, disrupting, transforming, etc. this border. Finally, write a verbal account of your field work and of the argument your visual representation articulates.

• New Border Crossing: Consider a border you would feel nervous to cross. Explore in writing the reasons for that nervousness. Then, find a way to cross this border. During your crossing and while you’re on the other side of this border, take notes about your experience. What are the logistics of the border-crossing? What kinds of discomfort are you experiencing? What are you doing to help create comfort (smiling more, not meeting people’s eyes, hiding behind your note-taking, etc., etc.) while you are in this unfamiliar territory? Also record your observations of people’s observations of you. Talk with those from the other side of this border about what their experience is with you and with others who cross into their territory. After you have crossed back to your territory, record any changes in your perception of this once anxiety-producing border. Write an account of your experience, including your early perceptions, your anxieties, your field notes, and your short interviews.

• Border Ambassador (A): Consider a border in which you participate as a member of the dominant group. Select a group of people your community/organization traditionally excludes (or perhaps doesn’t even think about). Research this excluded group and its concerns (both in library research and in conversation), also research the history of the exclusion of the group from your community (again, this should probably also represent both archival and field research). Write a grounded letter to the leaders of your community or to the editors of a publication for your community informing your group of your findings. See if you can propose any common goals/projects that might bring the two groups into a more amiable interaction.

• Border Ambassador (B): Consider a border in which you participate as a member of the non-dominant group. Select a community that has traditionally excluded (or perhaps doesn’t even think about) your group. Research your excluded group and its concerns (both in library research and in conversation), also research the history of the exclusion of the group from the dominant community (again, this should represent both archival and field research). Write a grounded letter to the leaders of the dominant community or to the editors of a publication for that community informing them of your findings. See if you can propose any common goals/projects that might bring the two groups into a more amiable interaction.

• Disloyalty Action: Read the short excerpts from Race Traitor in your reader. Consider a border in which you participate as a member of the dominant group. Select a group of people your community/organization traditionally excludes (or perhaps doesn’t even think about). Research this excluded group and its concerns (both in library research and in conversation). Also consider the technologies used to maintain this border. Strategize about ways you can be disloyal to your position with respect to this border and its maintenance. Enact some of these disloyal activities. As a letter to the editors of Race Traitor, write an account of your research and of your experience of disloyalty and the reactions it garnered. Make an argument with/against the editors regarding the political potential of this kind of action.

• Personal Option: Come up with a project of your own that similarly engages borders issues in a practical, productive way.

Assignment 6: Community Analysis Narrative Introduction/Proposal.

Assignment 7: Community Analysis Narrative: Review the strategies and techniques for creating and upholding borders that we’ve discussed and read about this quarter. In what ways do you see members of your own community or culture using these (or different) strategies to include some and exclude others. For instance, you might consider how speaking your native language (including English) and speaking it well may be used to judge and/or distance others. Or, you might consider the tacit or explicit messages you heard growing up about marrying outside your group or about being gay. You could also consider the ways your group employs stereotypes about others to construct a border.

Whatever strategy(ies) you choose to address, be sure to consider the effects the techniques have both on your community and on those deemed outsiders. Consider, too, how these strategies function in the face of the intersectionality of categories of difference. In what ways do you see the reality of your community not conforming to the idea that the border you consider is clear-cut, natural, and consistently stable. Why is the idea of a clear-cut, natural, and unchanging border problematic?

At some point in your essay you will need to define and describe your community for your readers. You may address any kind of community we have discussed (neighborhood, town, class, ethnic/racial group, gender, sexuality, religion) or some more complex community identification (Vietnamese Christians, working-class Anglos, Southern California straight republicans, etc.). If you choose to work with a community you have already considered in your border-crossing narrative or in your Open Borders Project, please try to challenge yourself in this assignment. Whatever community you choose, please be sure to focus on not the way you or your community is excluded from other groups, but the way your group maintains its borders.

Revision Assignment 7.

Final, well-edited revision of Assignment 7.

Portfolio organization, final reflective writing.