WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2024-2025       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Carcerality and Colonialism in California and Beyond: Junior Colloquium
AMST 217
Fall 2024
Section: 01  

This course explores the expansive history of surveillance, policing, and incarceration in the territory now known as California. Engaging Indigenous critiques of settler colonial power, we begin in the late 18th century when Spanish Franciscan priests and imperial soldiers enslaved Native people in missions along the Alta California coast. We will move through crucial sites, such as the first California legislature's 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, to the establishment of the US border patrol in the early 20th century, and the criminalization of mobility of Indigenous, Latinx, and mixed-race people from both sides of the US-Mexican border, considering how these cases illuminate Kelly Lytle-Hernández's insight that "mass incarceration is mass elimination." Reading across scholarship, archival sources, activism, and news coverage, we will discuss the relationship between militarization and carcerality locally and globally, from the American occupation of California during the Gold Rush (1849), to post-WWII racialized urban policing, to the current construction of the "security fence" along the US-Mexico border that cuts through Kumeyaay lands.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS AMST
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Student Option
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: None
Past Enrollment Probability: 75% - 89%

Last Updated on OCT-04-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459