| AFAM 115 | PHIL&MATRIX TRILOGY | CHANDLER, N. | 1. This course examines the problem of how to understand the time of our own lives historically - conceived as a critical archaeology of the future.
2. Its core focus is the blockbuster film project, The Matrix Trilogy (The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions), directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski from 1999 to 2004, including the special project that was also part of it, a collection of short films presented under the title Animatrix, involving several Japanese and Korean, and Chinese American, artists and directors working in manga and anime.
3. While the signature of the course is an engagement of the rich diversity of the religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions that have bearing for thinking a collective human future, as well as key global level historical turning points -- all of which are densely interwoven in The Matrix Trilogy -- its critical guide is the way in which the historicity of the African Diaspora, African Americans in the United States in particular, expose the most profound questions about the sense of a common futural historicity for humankind in general over the coming centuries.
4.The student who completes this course will understand both the need and some of the ways to go beyond traditional forms of history which remain so tied to traditional forms of identification in order to engage fully the diverse ways of life -- real and imagined -- that make up today’s globalized senses of world.
5. In addition to the Ultimate Matrix Collection from 2004, core documents for the course will include selections: from the contemporary writers and intellectuals Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Ernst Mayer, Raymond Kurzweil, Roger Penrose, Stuart A. Kauffman, Stephen Jay Gould, Shirley Tilghman, Ralph Ellison, Octavia Butler, Fredric Jameson, William Gibson, Hortense Spillers, Cornel West, Kevin Kelly, Edwin Black, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten, and Frank Wilderson III; from several films of the 1990s, Microsomos (Claude Nuridsany, Marie Pérennou, Jacques Perrin, 1996), A Bug’s Life (Pixar Studios, 1998), Ghost Dog (Jim Jarmusch, Forest Whitaker, 1999), Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii and Masmune Shirow, 1996), and, perhaps its sequel, Innocence [Ghost in the Shell 2](Mamoru Oshii and Masmune Shirow, 2004); from several classic texts in philosophy, natural science, literature, and cinema including work by Plato, Rene* Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Arnold Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, Lewis Carroll, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herbert Spencer, Gregor Mendel, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand de Saussure, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Albert Einstein, Ryunosuke Akutagawa and Akira Kurosawa; and from several major texts in religion and philosophy, not only the Abrahamic religious traditions (Judaic, Christian, and Islamic), but the Upanishads of the Indian sub-continent, and Buddhist thought in the texts of Nagarjuna, Santaraksita, Dōgen, as well as twentieth century Japanese and Buddhist philosophy in the work of Nishida, Kitarō.
6. This course is part of the STAR initiative -- Science, Technology, and Race -- established within the Program in African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. |
| AFAM 158 | PHIL GENOME RACE | CHANDLER, N. | 1. The course elaborates an investigation of the critical thought that in the history of modern thought and science the very idea of race is not an aberration or anachronism. It proposes, instead, that such an idea is encoded in the problem of the supposed commonness of the human, as it has been produced and engaged in modern discourses, in particular since the 18th century. These discourses include both philosophy and social-political-legal thought on the one hand and the sciences, social and natural, including among the latter not only biology and genetics, but even certain aspects of contemporary physics, on the other.
2. Beginning with Immanuel Kant’s attempt to formulate a philosophical concept of race, the course then engages the intellectual history of the concept of race since the late eighteenth century. This includes 19th century Darwinism and its interlocutors, early 20th century engagements with Mendelian inheritance, including both eugenics and then the evolving first synthesis in the biological sciences, as well as certain aspects of the critique of the concept of race by way of the production of a concept of culture in anthropology and ethnology on the one hand. It also considers more contemporary problematics, especially the massive implications of the mapping of the human genome and the rise of a new genetics, all of which now implicate projects for the reconstruction or enhancement of the human (both bodily and cognitive forms of intelligence, the cyborg, for example), and the ongoing reappearance of a 'new' eugenics' which have taken shape across the past quarter century, on the other.
The course addresses some of the most far reaching issues of the present and the future, considering especially the moral and ethical questions that arise therein. Thus, students of comparative literature, philosophy, history of science, and anthropology should find the course of great value in helping them prepare to address such difficult issues in all facets of professional and public life.
3. This course compliments the African American Studies course Philosophy and the Matrix Trilogy, which is also taught Winter 2014 and x-listed with Comp-Lit, Film and Media, and Anthropology. Those students who took the Matrix course in 2012 or 2013, can profitably take this course, or new students can usefully take both courses together this coming winter. Along classic and contemporary philosophy, science, and history texts, several programs from the four seasons of the Science Channel series “Through the Wormhole” narrated by Morgan Freeman will be among the required texts for the course.
4. This course is part of the STAR initiative -- Science, Technology, and Race -- established within the Program in African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. |