Race and American Literature After Civil Rights In 2025 literature by and about the racially minoritized exists at a paradoxical juncture: institutionalized and censored, feted as an instrument of consciousness-raising and denounced as woke and reverse-racist. In this course we will ask how we got here by exploring how writers of color from the 1960s onwards fought to enter the literary mainstream – a struggle broaching difficult questions about the relation between creative and political aspiration. Would these writers counter stereotype with empowering representation or refuse the burden of racial representativeness? Would they address white readers unfamiliar with racism or non-white readers already acquainted with its realities? And what would it mean for such aspirations to succeed against the backdrop of ratcheting inequality in and across the color line? Authors include Gloria Anzaldúa, Percival Everett, and R.F. Kuang.

Introduction to Black Studies This course considers the issues, epistemologies, and political investments central to Black Studies as a field. We will explore chronologically, thematically, and with an interdisciplinary lens the social forces and ideas that have shaped the individual and collective experiences of African-descended peoples throughout the African Diaspora. This course is a broad survey of the history of chattel slavery, colonial encounters, community life, and social institutions of black Americans. We will address issues of gender and class; the role of social movements in struggles for liberation; and various genres of black expressive cultures. Students will develop critical tools, frameworks, and vocabulary for further study in the field. Course materials may include Maulana Karenga’s Introduction to Black Studies, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Community-Engaged Work in Black Studies Speaking of scholarship and activism, scholar and chronicler, Manning Marable, argued: “Scholars have an obligation not just to interpret, but to act.” In this experiential course, we will explore debates on and legacies in activism and action within Black Studies. Students will prepare for and then participate in community-engaged activism which takes seriously the calls and debates within Black Studies to inform our knowledge through action and vice versa. The seminar component of the course will be used to reflect among peers on the dialogic relationship between theory and practice. Students' community work plans will be developed under the supervision of faculty.

The University and its Others In this course we will examine the history of Black Studies by asking fundamental questions about the modern university: what it is, who it is for, and what it might yet become. After surveying its entanglements with slavery, settler colonialism, and capitalism, we will examine how Black students and faculty fought, in the 1960s, to overhaul the institution’s social structure and ways of knowing. We will examine the challenges – from partisan backlash to political containment and professional self-interest – that arise from the institutionalization of these efforts in research and teaching programs like our own at Middlebury. Finally, we will examine how Black Studies has braved the turn to indebtedness and privatization animating higher education today.

Welfare Queens and Tiger Mothers: Racial and Gender Formation in Late Modernity From anxieties about Chinese bachelor societies to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's description of the Black family as a "tangle of pathology," the production of race works through ideas about (im)proper gender and kinship. In this course we will examine this dynamic in the post-1960s U.S., where African-Americans are represented as the pathological absence of these social forms – and Asian-Americans as their celebrated presence. We will explore how racial tropes like welfare queens, model minorities, and tiger mothers express transformations in the economy (from industry to service), state (from welfare to mass incarceration), higher education (from public to private good), and geopolitics. Finally, we will ask how African- and Asian-Americans reproduce and revise these scripts in pursuit of national belonging, interracial solidarity, and other horizons.

Eric Cheuk

Reviews and ratings for Eric Cheuk at Middlebury College.Eric Cheuk teaches Race and American Literature, Introduction to Black Studies, Community-Engaged Work and more.  Explore top rated instructors and find the best for you.Is Eric Cheuk good ? Find out on MiddCourses.

I was sort of put into this class, but I really ended up enjoying it. Professor Cheuk is very passionate about the material and I did learn a lot about the history of the university. Throughout the course there are five (I think) papers that you write and three of them are just reading responses, but the others do require a decent amount of research. Our class was small, so every class we would just discuss the readings we had to do for homework, so you do have to make sure you read. The way that professor Cheuk explains things is very concise and sometimes abstract, so you have to make sure you are really focused on what he says. Overall though I really enjoyed this class and professor Cheuk is awesome!