Critical Race & Ethnic Studies (CRES)

How does raceas cultural imaginaries and social practicesaffect people of African and Asian descent? How do racialized subjects challenge injustice and envision collective futures, not only for themselves but also for one another? We will explore these questions by delving into the historical and creative worlds of Afro-Asian encounters. We will examine media narratives of urban conflicts, attend to solidarity practices and visions of social change, trace shifting forms of identity and belonging across borders, and consider race and globalization in South-South contact zones. We will pay particular attention to different genres and mediums, such as documentary films, memoirs, theater, and travel writing. Through dialoguing with race-critical Afro-Asian traditions, students will develop the critical thinking, writing, and analytical skills necessary for engaging the problems and possibilities of our global present.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

This course provides an introduction to the foundational themes, debates, and methodologies in Native American and Indigenous Studies, examining how Indigenous peoples across the Americas challenge ongoing colonization, systemic racism, and structural inequalities. Through an interdisciplinary approach, students will explore Indigenous histories, cultures, languages, and contemporary issues while engaging with Indigenous perspectives, representations, and cultural expressions across various fields. The course critically examines Indigenous agency responding to cultural genocide, land dispossession, and environmental threats. It highlights the ways Native American and Indigenous communities assert sovereignty and protect their land, water, and territories amid colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal systems that impose displacement, extractivism, and oppression. Their advocacy for social change is expressed through political activism, literature, music, language revitalization, and digital media platforms. Through case studies from the United States, Central America, and South America, students will analyze the complex relationships between indigeneity, colonialism, and land. A key component of this course is a Community-Based Learning component, in which students will examine the Indigenous history of Worcester, with particular attention to Pakachoag Hill. Through readings, discussions, and critical analysis, the course fosters a deeper understanding of Indigenous agency, knowledge systems, and contributions to contemporary global movements for justice, self-determination, and cultural survival.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

Indigenous peoples and communities across Abiayala have demonstrated their agency through various media technologies during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In response to settler colonial oppression, they have used voices, images, and narratives to craft unique forms and aesthetics of broadcasting rooted in their communicative practices and knowledge systems.This course examines Indigenous voices and media practices across multiple territories, beginning with the Wallmapu (present-day Chile and Argentina), then moving to the Tawantinsuyu region (Peru and Bolivia), the Maya territories (Guatemala and Mexico), and finally Indigenous diasporic communities in Turtle Islanda term used by Native communities to describe what is now known as the United States. Students will critically engage with the agency of Indigenous peoples and their collaborative efforts with non-Indigenous allies in producing media content that contests ongoing colonization and systemic racism. Furthermore, students will analyze how Indigenous communities employ media technologies such as radio, film, and social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok to achieve media sovereignty. These practices not only establish contemporary media territorialities within and beyond ancestral lands but also generate communities of belonging. Through this exploration, students will understand how Indigenous media initiatives preserve languages and knowledge, create vocal and sonic territorialities, and challenge oppressive racial, gendered, class, and colonial structures. Additionally, these initiatives assert political and cultural self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty within settler colonial contexts.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

In this CRES Frameworks course, we will review foundational essays and critical vocabulary for the study of structures of race, ethnicity, and racism. We will examine the development of critical race theory and critical ethnic studies as interdisciplinary academic fields. Students will gain racial literacy and intercultural awareness on a wide variety of topics and are encouraged to ask their own pressing questions on racial inequality and specific topics they are passionate about.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

A powerful foreign woman who ultimately kills her children after her husband betrays her, Medea has captured the attention of countless writers, poets, and dramatists, both ancient and modern. Black Medeas is a course that traces the complex evolution of her character from ancient Greece to twenty-first century America. The crux of the course is an exploration of how Black authors like W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and Toni Morrison have reenvisioned and rewritten Medea to explore questions pertaining to slavery and migration, race and gender, duty and revenge. Exploring art, fiction, poetry, and drama, we will pay particular attention to the development of the dueling stereotypes of Mammy and Sapphire that shaped representations of African American women, particularly in the nineteenth century, and how each of these stereotypes were at odds with the white Cult of Domesticity that influenced literary depictions of motherhood. As such, the course will show how historical circumstances and individual positionalities shape how we read, understand, and write literary characters. Assignments will include literary analyses, podcasts, and creative options.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Literature

Indigenous peoples and communities across the Americas have demonstrated their agency through various media technologies during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In response to settler colonial oppression, they have used voices, images, and narratives to craft unique forms and aesthetics of broadcasting rooted in their communicative practices and knowledge systems. This course examines Indigenous voices and media practices across multiple territories, beginning with the Wallmapu (present-day Chile and Argentina), then moving to the Tawantinsuyu region (Peru and Bolivia), the Maya territories (Guatemala and Mexico), and finally Indigenous communities in Turtle Islanda term used by Indigenous communities to describe what is now known as the North of the Americas. Students will critically engage withthe agency of Indigenous peoples and their collaborative efforts with non-Indigenous allies in producing media content that contests ongoing colonization and systemic racism. Furthermore, students will analyze how Indigenous communities employ media technologies such as radio, film, and social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok to achieve media sovereignty. These practices not only establish contemporary media territorialities within and beyond ancestral lands but also generate communities of belonging. Through this exploration, students will understand how Indigenous media initiatives preserve languages and knowledge, create vocal, visual, and sonic territorialities, and challenge oppressive racial, gendered, class, and colonial structures. Additionally, these initiatives assert political and cultural self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty within settler colonial contexts.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

How does popular media shape the way we imagine race, technology, and the future? From Blade Runners neon cityscapes to cyberpunk anime, visions of the future often draw on what scholars call techno-orientalisma tendency to portray Asia as high-tech but dehumanized. This course turns that gaze around. We will explore how Asian and Asian diasporic writers, filmmakers, and artists use science fiction, fantasy, and other speculative genres to transform familiar tropessuch as alien encounters and zombie apocalypsesand craft narratives about social justice, planetary belonging, and collective survival. We will critically engage a wide range of mass-produced cultural works, such as commercial cinema, animation, graphic novels, and role-playing games. Ultimately, we ask how speculative storytelling can help us reimagine what it means to be human in a more-than-human future.

GPA units: 1

This course focuses on the rhetoric and practice of abolition. First, we will look at tactics in speech, writing, and direct action taken up by nineteenth-century abolitionists John Brown, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Tubman. Then, we will explore contemporary activists use of abolitionist frameworks to advance the cause of racial justice in work by Michelle Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Adrienne Marie Brown, Angela Davis, and Alex Vitale. It fulfills Group B and Group D requirements for the English major. Also counts toward Africana Studies. It does NOT fulfill the literature common area requirement.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Annually

This semester, we will consider how Indigenous nations in the Americas create, share, and preserve their stories. We will approach Native American texts through a rhetorical lens, considering the media through which Native American peoples make meaning, and how expressive forms sustain indigenous cultures, relations, and histories despite the ongoing colonization of the American continent. This course takes a hemispheric approach, meaning we will learn about Indigenous texts from North, Central, and South America. By the time you leave CRES 311, you will have engaged with a broad spectrum of indigenous media, from the Cherokee syllabary to Incan Khipus. You will also learn key terms in Native American/Indigenous Studies that will deepen your understanding of your own relations with settler colonialism and Indigenous worldviews and cosmologies.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

This course explores canonical works of Asian American literature as well as contemporary writings. We will investigate what it means to be Asian American by analyzing texts produced by writers with roots all over the globe and across multiple genres, including short stories, novels, memoirs, poetry, and plays. We will examine the distinctive contributions Asian Americans are making to these literary forms and consider how Asian American writers use a wide array of creative strategies to narrate history, respond to stereotypes, and tell new stories. Our reading will be informed by relevant scholarship, historical sources, and multimedia materials.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Literature

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course will introduce you to African American fiction, drama, poetry, essays, and film that range from the excitement and uncertainty of the post-Civil Rights era to the challenges of what some like to call our current postracial era. With a particular focus on family/marital tensions, the bonds of Black communities, responses to violence, and social class aspirations, the assigned texts highlight contemporary African American literature of recent decades beyond the popularity of Toni Morrisons works. We will examine how African American authors are challenging and innovating literary traditions as they depict different African American experiences of the past, present, and even the near future. Along the way, we will ask questions such as for whomand to whomdo these authors presume to speak? How does this literature define and situate African American identities? What is the relationship between African American communities in the texts and America as a whole? Authors may include August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Claudia Rankine, Tayari Jones, and Colson Whitehead. Exams and assignments: Two papers, a group presentation, midterm, and a final research-based project.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Literature

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course examines the trajectories of Toni Morrison's literary career, including books from her early, middle and late stages, as well as some of her own literary and cultural criticism. This course is an opportunity to engage in depth with a single author and to gain a deeper understanding of Morrison's style, form, and representations of American communities and histories.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Literature

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

In this course, we will explore the intersections of race, rhetoric, and law in North America from the fifteenth century Doctrine of Discovery to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to contemporary legal questions surrounding race-conscious admissions in higher education. In the seminar format, students will take on leadership roles in class discussion and assignments will focus on public speaking and rhetorical analysis of legal texts.

GPA units: 1

A West African proverb, popularized by Chinua Achebe, claims, until the lion learns to write history, history will always glorify the hunter. This course centers on the lions from across the globe who have written their own histories, speaking back to and resisting the hunters. For over five centuries, the West (Europe, and white settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia) has positioned itself as the pinnacle of civilization, science, and humanity. Yet those outside the West have primarily experienced it as a hunter, a violent colonizing force, eradicating their cultures and societies, stealing their land, resources, and peoples, and converting sovereign nations into victims, without whom the West could not exist. Enslaved, colonized, and exploited peoples have consistently rejected this victimization, instead consistently speaking, writing, and acting in response to imperial forces. These alternative understandings from across the globe, are at the center of this course which asks, How do colonized peoples understand the West? What has been the social, political, and economic impacts of the West for their communities, societies, and cultures? And what forms of resistance have communities mobilized to resist the West? Students in the course will explore these questions guided by perspectives and actions of those experiencing the violent underside of empire, inside and outside of the west, and engaging multiple scholarly and media forms (books, articles, poetry, films, music, and fiction). Assignments will enable students to articulate, compare, and engage understandings of the West historically and today, and apply them to contemporary anti-imperial decolonial movements.

GPA units: 1

How do empires shape global culturesand how do marginalized communities fight back with cultural means? This course explores the intersections of race, power, and expressive cultures in imperial and anti-imperial contexts. Moving from colonial encounters at the height of imperialism, through postwar anti-colonial struggles, to the afterlives of empire in the contemporary world, we will explore how literature, film, and community-centered cultural practices register and contest imperial structures and racialized systems of power. Students will engage with scholarly and artistic voices from Africa, Asia, and the Americas that challenge territorial control, militarization, sexual violence, resource extraction, and the enduring hierarchies of the West and the Rest. By the end of the course, students will gain critical tools to understand how culture both sustains and subverts empires in the making of modernity.

GPA units: 1

Once considered a nerdy niche game accused of encouraging demonism, the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons is undergoing a cultural renaissance. With increased visibility comes increased scrutiny, and D&D has responded to its own potentially problematic racial past by updating its game rules and narrative lore to be more culturally literate and inclusive. This course will explore the cultural history of the game while studying Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, a game module inspired by diverse real world cultures. Additionally, we will be reading classic fantasy texts that influenced the game, while watching films and reading graphic novels the game has inspired. The course culminates with students playing as a character from an ethnicity other than their own and writing reflective essays on what it is like to imagine yourself as a member of another culture, followed by a research project that builds a Radiant Citadel contribution focused on a world culture not already represented in the collection.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies