Overview

Professor Fujita-Rony demonstrates many techniques of analysis in her lectures to show how social historians work with primary sources like photographs, oral histories, legal documents, or news accounts in the mass media.  She also presents a theoretical framework for interpreting those sources that  invites you to consider how intimate, local relationships are transformed by structures of imperialism and state power.

The following assignment asks you to write a critical analysis of at least two different representations about the Filipina/o experience from different perspectives and explain how they present different narratives.  You should draw upon evidence from the lectures, books, and films.  Your section leader may choose the documents for you, or you may be given the opportunity to choose for yourself.

This assignment will help you begin to think about the skills that you will need for your final scholarly research paper in Spring about your own cultural identity  or community and become familiar with the conventions of scholarship that you will need later when you are writing an annotated bibliography or a prospectus.

Your essay should be 4-6 pages and will count for 30% of your writing grade.

As in previous essays this quarter, you will need to present your thesis in a series of logical claims that are supported with textual evidence in the form of specific quotations and linked with explanatory statements.  You will be expected to practice close reading. However you will be expected to choose the most significant passages yourself, which is no easy task.  Allow sufficient time to reread the texts several times and choose phrases and sentences that seem worth the effort of sustained interpretation.

Keep in mind advice from Professor Fujita-Rony and your section leader about the evaluation and interpretation of primary sources.  There are many primary sources about Filipina/o Americans in the U.S. West in the Reader (newspaper stories, legal cases, personal narratives, etc.), and the oral histories in the film Dollar a Day, Ten Cents a Dance count as primary sources.  Photographs from American Workers, Colonial Power can also serve as primary sources.

For this assignment, you should focus on your two specific documents.  Your second Discovery Task will give you information about other primary sources from JSTOR and secondary sources in Project Muse that may help you understand more about what scholars in different fields have said about contemporaneous texts and related historical actors and issues, but you do not need to use extraneous material in your essay.

You should also think critically and creatively about possible key words associated with structures of power such as those constituted by categories of gender, race, and class.  Even the use of simple words like "person" or "member" may gives you clues for your analysis.  You should also pay attention to factors that are important to historians like agency (who does what), the causal sequence of events, and relations of power.

Read "Analyzing Primary Sources" (63-65), "Comparison and Contrast" (66-68), "Application" (69-71), "Priciples of Organization" (72-74), and the special Core Course Guides on "Topic Sentences," "Transitions," and "Three Principles of Paragraphing" (75-82)  in the Writer's Handbook before beginning.  You should also read "comparison and contrast as a method of development" and "comparisons" and the section on sources (35-38) in Writing from A to Z.

A successful essay will do the following:

• Demonstrate that you have read and viewed the materials about Filipina/o Americans in the U.S. West in-depth and more than once.
• Offer an interpretation of the texts when read together that does more than mechanically compare and contrast their most obvious features, although including obvious but important comparisons and contrasts can be useful to give the reader context
• Apply Professor Fujita-Rony's methods to your own focused analysis of primary documents
• Demonstrate specific techniques of analysis (i.e. narrative analysis, image analysis, etc.)
  
• Give the reader sufficient evidence to support the argument for your particular interpretation, so that subjective claims are supported by objective evidence
• Connect all claims to your evidence (in the form of specific quotations from the text) with logical warrants.
• Punctuate all quotations correctly
• Keep the reader on track by means of clear signals, clear paragraphing, interesting topic sentences, and relevant evidence in the form of quotations from the text

Undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty from the School of Humanities at UCI use recent scholarship to design presentations and materials for use in Southern California public schools.  It is important to make certain that these materials for K-12 classrooms are clear, interesting, and thought-provoking to students.  These materials must also respect the educational goals of the state standards and the expectations of local parents, teachers, and principals.  You may want to look at some of the materials developed by the UCI Humanities Out There program or the UC California Social Sciences / History Project to help you think about these issues.