The First-Year Program LSP 111: Explore Chicago [email protected] Autumn Quarter 2013 UPDATED 9/10/2013 Course Faculty Description On Chicago’s South Side, the 47th Street thoroughfare and the neighborhoods it concourses between Lake Michigan and the Dan Ryan Expressway go by a slew of historic euphemisms: the Black Belt, Kenwood, Bronzeville, Grand Boulevard, Blues Mecca, and the Strip. Lyrical tags coined and hummed by bluesmen, preachers, proletariats, panderers, and real estate developers. Ostentatious tags contrived by reverse carpetbaggers 47th Street Bronzeville: on the take, come to Chicago’s South Side in search of the Promised Land and all such a sacrosanct notion entails From the Great Bayo Ojikutu in the migrant imagination: freedom, hope, God, truth, survival, acclimation and at the very end of their trek, Migration to English opportunity. We will engage 47th Street as a historic landing place for Black Americans migrating from the U.S. Re-Gentrification South. We will address that which so differentiates and complicates these three Chicago miles: its blue rhythms, its bourgeois pretensions, its parochial sensibilities, and its imposed yet embraced (and fiercely protected) demographic homogeny. In so doing, we will traipse through a place once so self-sustained, one which remains palpably insulated from the rest of the Chicago cultural landscape; a 47th Street that even in its raging blue irony, quite acutely reflects its Southern lineage, its urban industrial locus, and its American heritage. In this course, we will visit several important landmarks and discuss their aesthetic value. We shall use the city as our text and consider the city of Chicago as a kind of work of art. Since to fully appreciate anything at all, it is necessary to know something about its history and genesis, we will spend some time studying the history of Chicago, with a focus on the people and events behind the current layout of the city. In addition to introducing you Elizabeth Millán Appreciating Beauty in to the city, this course will also serve as an introduction to philosophy, in particular to the branch of philosophy Brusslan the City that deals with issues concerning beauty, that is, aesthetics. We might all agree that the view of the Chicago skyline Philosophy from Buckingham Fountain or the view of the river from Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive is beautiful, but why do we agree? What makes a given thing or collection of things beautiful? Is a more diverse city a more beautiful city? Is a more beautiful city a more valuable city? In this course we shall explore such questions as we explore the city of Chicago. This course will give students a multicultural perspective on two communities that have been at odds for the past century over the issue of sovereignty in Palestine/Israel. Despite the apparent conflict with respect to this issue, these two communities are both significant minorities amongst the diverse ethnicities, races, and religions that Arab and Jewish Daniel Kamin make up Chicago. Both immigrant communities have established solid foundations in metropolitan Chicago and Chicago International Studies both contribute to the multicultural diversity of the area. As neither community is homogeneous, the diversity within each will also be covered. A primary purpose of the course will be to explore avenues of commonality between these two communities in order to promote rapprochement/reconciliation between them. John Karam Arab Americans number more than 150,000 today in the Chicagoland region. Tracing their origins to more than Arab Chicago Latin American & twenty countries in the Arab world, immigrants and descendents maintain hundreds of community centers, Latino Studies religious congregations, professional associations, and eating establishments, reflecting and shaping contemporary LSP 111: EXPLORE CHICAGO AUTUMN 2013 Chicago. Grounded in literary studies, anthropology, history, media studies, and sociology, this course will examine the range of Arab American identities and identifications in the twentieth century. By exploring topics such as immigration, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, homeland and exile, US American foreign policy, as well as popular culture, students will be introduced to various contours of the Arab experience and community in Chicago and the United States. Authors to be read include the award-winning novelist, Diana Abu-Jaber; the artist, activist, and Def Poetry Jam star, Suheir Hammad; as well as local writer, reporter, and comedian, Ray Hanania. The purpose of this course is to provide an in-depth study on the implications of gender, masculinity and patriarchy within communities of color in the city of Chicago. This course will explore: the sociological, Being a Man of Color: Eric Mata philosophical and theoretical foundations of gender, masculinity and patriarchy as they exist in minority Exploring Race & Multicultural Student populations; contemporary issues facing men of color in the United States of America and in the city of Chicago; Masculinity in Chicago Success the implications of the presidency of Barack Obama; and academic success related to gender within the Chicago Public Schools system. An important facet of the course will be students plotting their own social location with relation to the major themes of the course. Rock ’n roll, reggae, funk, R&B, hip hop, and rap would not be what they are, notwithstanding the possibility of nonexistence, without their foundation: the blues. Affectionately known as the blues capital of the world,‖ Chicago has one of the richest blues cultures in the world. As a product of the Great Migration, African-American blues Michael Roberts players from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas flooded to Chicago for work and to perfect their craft. The austere Chicago Blues College of Science & urban environment added a new dimension to their playing style: a rougher, faster, more powerful sound than what Health was played in their delta home. This course will provide students with the opportunity to explore the city through its blues culture. We will also examine the city’s history, geography, economy, politics, identity, social interactions, and cultural relations. Diversity has strong presence in the dance community in Chicago. Students will understand the city of Chicago through the study of this rich diversity in various neighborhoods with excursions to Hubbard Street Dance Chicago downtown, Chicago Moving Company in Roscoe Village, Hromovytsia Dance Ensemble in Ukrainian Village and Linda Kahn Chicago Folk Dance in Hyde Park. We will also tour the longstanding 1889 Auditorium Theater and the 1910 Chicago Dancing Theatre Hamlin Field House Theater to appreciate these Chicago historical institutions. Students will interact with culturally diverse neighborhood audiences, ethnic group members and Alejandro Cerrudo. who choreographed Hubbard Street’s ―A Thousand Pieces‖ inspired by a Chicago treasure Chagall’s ―Windows‖ and Melissa Thodos who created a Chicago award-winning story ballet ―The White City‖ about the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. This course will focus on a child’s perspective of growing up in the city as told in their memoirs by people who actually did grow up in Chicago. Students will be able to get an insider’s view of Chicago as a city of distinct neighborhoods and how the cultural forces in those neighborhoods shaped the people who emerged from them. We will focus on the remembrances of authors from three ethnic groups: African American, Jewish, and Irish; and research and visit neighborhoods that were once home to these groups. This focus will naturally lead to a Jan Hickey Chicago Memoirs discussion of the following questions: Do children have similar experiences today? If they are different, what forces English resulted in those differences? Are those influences – historical, geographical, economical – peculiar to Chicago? What significance for Chicago’s future do these similarities/differences hold? Because the primary reading material for the course will be memoirs, we will also be examining the characteristics of this literary genre and how it may shape a reader’s response to the material. The memoirs will provide reflections on the rich ethnic heritage that, in some ways, is unique to Chicago and offer students an opportunity to examine their own perceptions of different LSP 111: EXPLORE CHICAGO AUTUMN 2013 neighborhoods in the light of reality. Students will also read selections from other literary genres written by people who grew up in the same neighborhood, allowing them to see how one either compliments or contradicts the other. Forget the Cubs. Forget the Sox. Forget the Bears, Bulls, Blackhawks. Politics is Chicago’s #1 spectator sport. That’s because politics in Chicago touches almost all aspects of city life from trash collection to social services and taxes. Chicago’s politicians are often flamboyant although sometimes corruptible figures. (Since 1972, 28 aldermen have gone to prison.) They both delight and enrage voters and are constant ―front page‖ news. This course will Chicago Politics: introduce ―Explore Chicago‖ students to Chicago’s political institutions: City Hall, its system of 50 wards, current Craig Sautter Bosses & Reformers aldermen and women, its mayor, its elections, and its raucous history of scandals and reform movements. Students School for New also will debate contemporary political/social issues which come before the mayor and city council during the Learning Autumn Quarter. And they will