1. In “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Hazel Carby writes that when “considering the complex cultural transformations that not only accompany but are an integral part of…demographic shifts,” it’s important to challenge “simplistic mythologies” regarding how various racialized populations came to inhabit various urban spaces. Moreover, according to Carby, the “movement of black women between rural and urban areas and between southern and northern cities generated a series of moral panics” in the early part of the twentieth century (Carby, 740). For this paper, put Carby’s analysis of “simplistic mythologies” and “moral panics” into conversation with Nayan Shah’s chapter “Public Health and the Mapping of Chinatown,” in Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown and Susan Schweik’s The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. In what ways were urban working-class African-American women, Chinese immigrants, and disabled subjects part of a “moral panic”? Were there “simplistic mythologies” surrounding these populations that made it easier for them to be understood as a social and political problem? What standards of normalcy and/or deviance were used to justify government and/or institutional interventions into the lives of black women, Chinese immigrants, and the disabled? And finally, according to Carby, Shah, and Schweik, what do you think social reformers, health officials, and lawmakers fail to recognize about how these populations inhabited urban cities?
2. Discuss Rob Nixon’s conception of slow violence in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, and put his analysis into conversation with two texts from earlier in the semester. For the first part of your paper, discuss Nixon’s characterization of slow violence. How is slow violence defined, and what are some of its central features? How is this form of damage and destruction distinct from more popular or common conceptions of violence? What are its similarities to and differences from structural violence? In the second half of your paper, put Nixon’s analysis in conversation with two readings from the course. How do these texts define and characterize violence? How does Nixon’s analysis of slow violence change, challenge, or complicate your understanding and analysis of the other two readings?
3. In her article “The Evidence of Experience,” Joan Scott challenges the idea that “[s]eeing is the origin of knowing” and that the communication of knowledge is gained through “(visual, visceral) experience” (Scott, 776). Instead, according to Scott, “[e]xperience is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation” (797). For this paper, discuss Scott’s claims regarding the value and limits of experience and put her analysis into conversation with two other readings from the course. How do these texts define or characterize the concept of experience? How does Scott’s analysis of experience deepen or complicate your view of experience as depicted in the earlier readings?
