Writing Black Worlds: Race and the Practice of Ethnography

How do we translate the lived experience of “being black in America” into a text? What does it mean, as Catherine Cole has described, to make “ethno” into “graphic”? In this seminar we will investigate the relationships among race, gender, and ethnographic writing. We will engage in ethnographic research techniques including interviews, performance observation, oral history, and participant-observation. Text may include all or portions of W.E.B. DuBois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899), John L. Jackson, Jr.’s Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (2005), and Nikki Jones’s Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-city Violence (2009). (Any 0100 level course in AMST or GSFS or SOAN)