by Michael Woodsmall
Anne-Maria Makhulu was never much of a couch potato and had never seen The Wire. But when at a conference a few years ago she overheard mentor Judith Halberstam, an English professor at the University of Southern California, having an animated conversation about the show, she decided that it must be worthy of a viewing. She took it with her as her only company while finishing a book manuscript in New York City. And it was then that she thought she had to teach a course on this.
When she returned to Durham, she expressed her interest in teaching the course at a faculty meeting and was greeted with an enthusiastially positive reaction. That response was validated by the course’s high enrollment in its first semester of being offered.
“For me, as an anthropologist, The Wire is incredibly socially robust. It reveals a world with all of its [connections],” Makhulu says, channeling Halberstam’s enthusiasm.
In a recent interview on Up Front with Tony Cox, Makhulu and Jason Mittell, a professor of American studies and media culture at Middlebury College, discussed the television program’s use in classrooms. Mittell emphasized how it brings together seemingly disparate worlds.
The extraordinary social imagination of head writers David Simon and Ed Burns portrays oft-ignored issues in an accessible way, encouraging conversations that were only whispers before.
“Most of us are teaching this as a ploy,” admits Makhulu. “Not to be deceitful, but to appeal to students to think about very difficult issues.”
The course is in the catalogs at the University of California—Berkeley, Middlebury and Harvard, though each iteration has a different curriculum. At Berkeley, renowned feminist scholar and author of Hardcore, Linda Williams teaches it from a more literary perspective, asking the question, what is so great about The Wire?
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