As a distinct field of academic study, Ethnic Studies grew out of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and took shape first in the form of Black Studies and Afro-American Studies departments and programs in California, and later spread to universities across the country. Soon thereafter Asian American Studies, Chican@/Latinx Studies, and American Indian/Native American/Indigenous Studies programs emerged as colleges and universities found institutional space (often begrudgingly) to house intellectuals and activists whose work focused on the historical, social, political, cultural, and economic experiences of marginalized racial and ethnic groups living within the United States. The field of Comparative Ethnic Studies is of more recent origin, as scholars over the last few decades began to see analytical shortcomings and intellectual pitfalls in the narrow cultural nationalisms that drove the work in these earlier fields of study. Social scientists and humanists engaged in the broader project of Ethnic Studies began to think comparatively, and focused their intellectual energy on studying the ways in which the complex histories of race and ethnicity in the greater Americas were formed through cultural cross-pollination and overlapping historical experiences of movement and settlement—experiences that were themselves often forged in the crucible of interethnic and interracial conflict—as well as inflected by issues of gender, region, religion, economics and social class, sexuality, and empire.

Over the course of this term, we will study the origins of Ethnic Studies as a field of inquiry, understand the historical and social conditions that produced its core questions, and follow the field’s development over the course of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. In doing so, we will also come to think about race and ethnicity (especially as they intersect with other social locations like gender, class, region, religion, and sexuality) as critical sites of scholarly inquiry, as well as lenses through which we can better understand our current moment.

The course will be framed both chronologically and thematically. We will map the historical trajectory of the field and the processes through which Ethnic Studies’ analytics (i.e., how it sees and interprets its subject matter) became more nuanced and capacious, moving from a narrow focus on the experiences of single racial and ethnic groups (and mostly males within those groups) with the presumption that they could be studied as such, to the more current trend of not only doing comparative work across shared histories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and region, but understanding the importance of globalizing processes to the experiences of racial and ethnic minority populations within the U.S.

We will meet as a class on Zoom weekly, or every other week, to discuss readings, participate in small group work, and to give short presentations. Your presence and robust participation in our virtual meetings is an essential component of the course, and will help foster a sense of intellectual community that is essential to doing the rigorous scholarly work of thinking deeply, critically, and intersectionally about race, racism, and ethnicity. We will also meet in-person 3-5 times throughout the course for field trips, to engage with guest speakers, and to work in person on group projects.

About the Instructor

Jason Chang – College Prep School
Jason Chang joined the history department at College Prep in 2021, and teaches Asian and Atlantic history to ninth and tenth graders. Before arriving at CPS, he taught for ten years at Bentley, where he covered topics that ranged from ninth grade world history to seminars on the prison industrial complex, the Cold War in a global context, the global revolutions of 1968, race in American legal history, the history of capitalism and slavery, and many others.

Originally from Berkeley, Jason obtained his BA in American Studies with a concentration in Ethnic Studies from UC Santa Cruz, and earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in American Studies, where his broad area of research focused on the intersecting histories of racial formation, capitalism, and empire. He is a passionate classroom teacher who believes deeply that having a strong historical understanding of the ways that race, gender, sex, class, ability, and other markers of difference and identity have shaped our present is a prerequisite for radically reimagining how we want our shared future to look. Whenever he has some down time, Jason loves nothing more than to read, eat delicious food, and cook.