| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 9 | DISCIPLINING MINORITIES: RACE-MAKING PROJECTS IN THE US | COX, A. | This course will provide students with an introduction to the concept of “multiculturalism” by focusing on its critics. The USA mythically conceives of itself as a nation of immigrants whose various geographical origins, ethnicities, and cultures coexist harmoniously in the proverbial melting pot of shared national identity as Americans. However, critics demonstrate how the rhetoric of American multiculturalism serves to manage the nation-state’s ethnic minority populations while upholding the white supremacist ideology and practices on which the US was founded. Furthermore, the notion of American multiculturalism obscures the settler colonial system that continues to suppress the sovereignty of Native American nations by racializing their citizens as “Indians” and misrepresenting them as ethnic American minorities rather than dual citizens of the US and their own Native nations. One example of this is the common academic practice of relegating Native American literature and cultural studies to ethnic studies, “minority discourses” within American studies, or a marginal branch of American literature within English departments. This course will work beyond a multicultural framework to recenter the problem of political equality. Students will read Native and African-American literatures in comparative contexts to examine the establishment of social and ethnic hierarchies in the US. Whereas Africans and their descendents were racialized as Black through slavery, the one-drop rule, and Jim Crow laws designed to proliferate Black people as a source of exploitable labor, Indigenous Americans were racialized as Indians through blood quantum requirements and compulsory institutionalization in Indian boarding schools that were designed to eliminate the population of Native people over time, opening their lands up for further colonial settlement. Students will explore theories and practices of discipline and punishment as they pertain to sociopolitical processes of constructing racial difference in the US. Course readings will include slave narratives, Indian boarding school narratives, and scholarship on the prison industrial complex. |
| COM LIT 10 | ANIME | TERADA, R. | This course explores how anime imagines world crisis and the end of "Japan." We discuss anime, especially feature films, that work on this topic, and ask why and how the anxiety they show is coming up now. The goal of the class is for students to collaborate on new ideas about the politics and aesthetics of anime and what it means to think about the limits of the modern world from within Japan. The emphasis will be on on questioning and working together in a friendly environment. Some films and OVAs to be viewed include: Yasuhiro Yoshiura, Pale Cocoon; Makoto Shinkai, Voices of a Distant Star; Bones studio [Masahiko Minami, Hiroshi ÅŒsaka, Toshihiro Kawamoto], No 6, season 1; Mamoru Oshii, Sky Crawlers; Shuko Murase, Ergo Proxy (20+ episodes); Satoshi Kon, Paprika. Requirements: participation, 2 short papers, miderm, final. |
| COM LIT 60C | CULTURAL STUDIES | SCHLICHTER, A. | How do we think about the "self?" How is the ideas of self dependent on cultural contexts? How do different media impact the idea of the self? How are notions of race, gender and sexuality inscribed in "selfhood?" The class introduces students to a variety of cultural practices (fictional and non-fictional writing, film, audio, new media) by looking at ideas of selfhood. We will study autobiographical narratives in order to discuss how they use different strategies to represent a self, or how they construct and problematize identity. The materials will range from the 18th to the 21th century, and will include autobiographical writings (such as Rousseau's Confessions and Olaudah Equiano's slave narrative), documentary films and self-representation in social networks. Requirements: regular attendance and participation in class discussion, regular postings/ blog entries, creative project and presentation to class, midterm/final. |
| COM LIT 105 | INDIGENOUS FEMINISMS | COX, A. | Indigenous feminisms assert that gendered forms of violence in Native American and Indigenous communities—including sexual violence as well as the imposition of heteronormativity and patriarchy—are key components of the structure of settler colonialism. Indigenous feminist scholars note the erasure of Indian women as significant figures in history and culture, acknowledge the ways that Indigenous communities often internalize the settler colonial ideology of heteropatriarchy, and demonstrate that gender and sexual violence are methods of American Indian genocide. Indigenous feminist theories contest the view that Indigenous sovereignty and gender justice are separate political goals and argue that gender justice must be part of any strategy or theory of decolonization. This course engages a wide array of Indigenous feminisms drawn from various thematic and transnational contexts across the Americas, Hawai’i, Australia, and New Zealand. Students will explore the foundations of Indigenous feminist theories in Black and women of color feminist thought and consider multiple intersections of gender, race, indigeneity, patriarchy, and settler colonialism as articulated in Native American and Indigenous studies and Indigenous feminist theories of sovereignty. Course readings include creative and critical literature written by Indigenous writers whose work remaps settler colonial geographies and imagines or creates Indigenous alternatives to enduring forms of imperialistic, gendered spatial violence. Students will also learn the critical contexts of Indigenous feminisms which encompass the fields of anthropology, history, law, dance, and postcolonial studies. |
| COM LIT 107 | GLOBALIZ FROM BELOW | JOHNSON, A. | This course will be organized around the question of what globalization looks and feels like from below: this can mean both what is called the global south (what used to be called the third world) but also includes the face of globalization looks for those who may be on the loosing end of things in the global north as well. Are differences in space and time shrinking in the same way all over the planet? Is the present defined by speed, mobility, interconnectedness and hybridity for everyone? How is globalization being resisted or reformulated by those who call themselves anti-globalization? What if we are moving towards becoming, as Mike Davis suggests, a planet of slums? The first 6-7 weeks of class will lay the ground through readings which consider the impact of globalization on the organization of social movements, notions of identity, transformations of culture, experiences of space etc. in addition to the consideration of a few particular contexts through films and other readings. As this is the capstone seminar for the Global Cultures major, however, particular emphasis will be placed on students’ creative and critical contributions and to that end, the last 3-4 weeks of the class will be organized and run by student groups. Groups will be responsible for selecting an appropriate topic, identifying reading material as well as crafting study questions and assignments for the rest of the class in close consultation with me. Students will also be asked to write a final paper that comes out of the work with and topic of their group. |
| COM LIT 130 | BUTLER & ATWOOD | CHANDLER, N. | This seminar examines the problem of how to understand the time of our own lives historically – the work of which is conceived here as a critical archaeology of our senses of the future. For the spring term of 2016, this course is devoted to the futuristic speculative fiction of Octavia Butler’s Parable duology, 1993-1998 (Parable of the Sower, 1993 and Parable of the Talents, 1998, of which a third volume remained incomplete upon her passing) and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy from 2003-2013 (Oryx and Crake, 2003, The Year of the Flood, 2009, and MaddAddam, 2013). Notably, the Wachowski’s made-for- television series Sense8 from 2015 (the first 12 episodes, so far released) will be required viewing and serve as a counterpart form of narrative for the course. The student who completes this course will understand both the necessity and possibility of thinking beyond traditional forms of supposed historical and philosophical understanding, even within literature, which remain so tied to traditional forms of identification – primarily but not only senses of human – in order to engage fully the diverse possibilities of historical existence – primarily those oriented toward the future, real and imagined, utopian and dystopian – that make up today’s global and truly cosmopolitan – that is to say cosmological, both micrological and macrological – senses of world. In the course of which we deal with climate change, the breakdown of California’s gated communities, corporate greed and global governance, misogyny, AI, new religions and new forms of religiosity, and the cyborg, whether human and machine or human and other animal. This is thus fundamentally a course about the relative and difficult different senses of world – that comprise our (whomever is such) future(s). This seminar is a part of a series of courses (taught by this professor), with alternating topics that respectively – that is to say, in different ways – take up the problem of thinking otherwise than our dominant senses of the human. The course is an upper division writing intensive seminar. This means students who wish to take this course should be prepared for both substantial reading and substantial writing. |
| COM LIT 131 | PSYCHOANALYSIS | TERADA, R. | This course introduces psychoanalytic theories of consciousness and unconsciousness, especially as developed by Freud in two of his major works, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and The Interpretation of Dreams. We'll discuss dream motivation and function, parapraxes (or Freudian slips), symptoms, resistance, trauma, melancholia, and recovery. We'll also explore psychoanalytic thinking through the writings of British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott and through films. We'll treat the films not as illustrations of psychoanalytic ideas, but as works that themselves develop new psychoanalytic theories. One of the main aims of the course is to encourage questioning about thinking's complexity. Class experience emphasizes mutual exploration and collaboration. |
| COM LIT 143 | MAD MEN CRAZY WOMEN | SCHLICHTER, A. | This is not a class about a TV show (as relevant as Don Draper’s story might be to contemporary culture). Rather, we will deal with representations of the experience what today is called “mental illness” and its gendering. Some theorists have posed the question how “madness” can be communicated if we understand it as the condition of a mind at the limits of language. Such a problematics is of particular interest in narratives, which use the perspective of an individual deemed “mad” in order to provide a critique of society, i.e. try to rearticulate “madness” as social pathology. We will explore these issues in a range of contemporary theoretical and literary texts, films and examples from popular culture. One of the major interests concerns the roles of gender and race in the construction of madness and in the experience of subjects regarded as “mad.” Readings might include Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony. Movies of interest include Miloš Forman, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down. We will also listen to the voices of the survivors of mental illness and to mental health activists. Students will participate in the student spring conference "Reclaim Mental Health" (as audience, workshop participants). Requirements: Regular attendance and participation in class discussion, midterm, final, weekly blog entries or final paper (about 12 pp). |
| COM LIT 150 | TRANSNATIONAL KOREA | KIM, K. | |
| COM LIT 160 | GANGS OF BOLLYWOOD | AHMAD, A. | The title of this course, “Gangs of Bollywood,” pays homage to the immensely successful and influential Bollywood movie, “Gangs of Wasseypur,” which has its own inter-textual, embedded reference to the equally successful Hollywood film “Gangs of New York.” This initial connection/contrast works at several planes. “Wasseypur” was successful strictly on the scale of the Indian national market and its director, Anurag Kashyap, would be almost completely unknown outside the world of Hindi cinema; by contrast, “Gangs of New York” was an international success just as Scorcese, the director, is a formidable figure in global cinema. This raises interesting questions about the national and global markets even in this era of purported globalization and the even more complicated question of the technical and formal authority that Hollywood has exercised over Bombay/Bollywood cinema since the very inception of the latter. Thus, “Wasseypur” rehearses, in a characteristic Bollywood “masala” mix, a number of formal tropes that Indian cinema borrows from various genres and phases of the American film: melodrama (the central form of the Bollywood movie), the classical noir (translated into Mumbai Noir), the Western and even “spaghetti western” (Curry Western in Bollywood parlance), the family romance, the crime thriller, and so on. A question that will concern us throughout the course is: what happens to western form when it arrives in the (neo-)colony and gets filled with indigenous social content? What happens, for instance, to the more recent sub-genres such as the political thriller or the erotic thriller when it arrives and gets re-activated in societies wherepolitical power structures and sexual mores are so very different. Does even an outright imitation remain simply an imitation? Or, does something more complex, more original emerge out of this unique process of domesticating the foreign form that is globally dominant. In Bollywood films as in Hollywood cinema, the figure of the gang is complex and serves great many purposes. Two of the most famous and commercially highly successful Bollywood movies of recent years are Maqbool and Omkara, flamboyantly irreverent re-tellings of Shakespeare’s MacBeth and Othello respectively, that Vishal Bhardawaj has directed for mass audiences the majority of whom would be entirely unschooled in anything Shakespearean while large cross-sections of urban middle class audiences encounter Shakespeare again and again, obsessively, in their school and college syllabi, as the ultimate pinnacle of the cultural superiority of the departed colonial power, the British, who formulated those enduring syllabi in the first place. What happens to MacBeth and her famous consort when they re-appear, beset by the dark tones of the classic noir, as the Don and his mistress in the milieu of the Bombay Muslim Mafia which is itself trying to imitate the ways of life of the Muslim feudal aristocracy of yesteryears, including the routine violence endemic among such aristocracies? Or to Othello, if the whole plot is moved to the stagnant, corrupted hinterlands of rural North India—a beyond-the- law ‘Wild West’ in its own right? Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted quite often, for stage and then for film, in terms of contemporary settings. What is special about these particular films? Are these postcolonial deconstructions of colonially authoritative texts? Are they borrowing Shakespeare’s authority to debunk power structures in their own postcolonial society of today? Perhaps both, to varying degrees, and much more. What is significant, however, is the attempt to translate Shakespeare into the film language of popular culture that Bollywood has invented for itself. Three other issues will also concern us prominently. First, the strange interplay of misogynist voyeurism and female empowerment in specific films of this genre, such as Bandit Queen and Godmother, and in the construction of female sexuality more generally. Second, the involvement of the gang and the mob in issues of ethnic identity and religious violence: Bombay, Earth:1947, Parzania. The third issue is more complex. Bombay cinema was born in the last decades of colonial power in India and began coming into its own, from 1930s onwards, in conjunction with the Progressive Writers Movement. High realism (mixed with romance) was often the narrative form, deployed for explicit social and political criticism. That phase ended in the 1960s and a radically new form arose in mid-1970s, in what now became Bollywood-- which this course will examine. What then happened to that heritage of film as medium of socio-political criticism? We shall see how older contents get re-articulated in new filmic forms. Students will also read a number of texts of film theory and film criticism, the latter drawn mostly from Indian sources. |
| COM LIT 190W | THINKING WITH WATER | JOHNSON, A. | This class is the capstone seminar for the Comparative Literature major and as such focuses on independent research and a longer writing project. The theme for this year is the question of how, from the humanities, and from a discipline like comparative literature, we can have something to say about a topic that seems, at first glance, to be far removed from our area of study: water. Water might seem to be unambiguous, something that is “out there”, part of nature and best studied by biologists or engineers or, at best, by historians. Part of the challenge then involves a question of what we mean by water, what theoretical tools we use to conceptualize it, what narrative forms are used to talk about water (by whom and when?), and what aesthetic resources are brought to bear in the way we represent water. We will be reading theoretical pieces, poetry and watching fiction films and documentaries. |
| COM LIT 210 | READINGS IN THE HISTORY OF THE PRESENT | AHMAD, A. | The idea/question of ‘The Present’ has been addressed in various ways in the Western philosophical tradition—or in what Habermas might call The Discourse of Modernity—from, say, Kant to Foucault, as something central to the self-consciousness of Modernity. The course begins with some interrogation of the methodological problems involved in thinking about The Present in our time. Can the Present be identified with certain dates, on the calendral model, like a century or even a decade? Is it something of a caesura between a Past and a Future, too fleeting and unformed and ineffable to be known as History, properly speaking? Is it too close to us, too ingrained into our subjectivity, hammered too strongly into our unconscious, for any reliable understanding of it, while what we believe we know is rendered all the more unreliable by the mediatic world that we inhabit, the Hyperreal, the Society of the Spectacle, and so forth? Or, is it that the Present is all that we can really know since it is only the real and the concrete, that which we ourselves value or endure, that can be properly imagined? Louis Althusser says somewhere that history is of course made up of countless facts but only a very few of those facts are really historical. What are those few facts that frame the History of The Present? Our Present. Conceptually, the Present could perhaps be viewed best as the temporality of an existing field of force, a terrain of structures and agencies as they exist within that temporality, generating processes and events (including thought events) that may or may not be connected causally but do intersect in ways obvious as well as imperceptible. We shall interrogate the field of force that is our own Present, across disciplinary boundaries of economy, politics, culture, literature, religion, geography. Students should read the following texts before coming to class: 1- Alain Badiou, The Century, ‘Search for a Method’, pp. 1-10. 2- Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, in The Ideology of Theory: Essays 1971-1986, Volume 2: Syntax of History (pp. 178-208) 3- Aijaz Ahmad, ‘ Literature Among the Signs of our Time’, in In Theory (pp 43-72) 4- Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1-17, 559-585. |
| COM LIT 210 | CONFLICT IN THEORY | MOR, L. | While the management of life through conflict is ever more prevalent today, current political discourse instructs us to avoid disagreements at all costs, sanctifying consensus as the “best practice” of politics. Given this disavowal of conflict, this seminar takes on the task of reconsidering the theorization of conflict and disagreement, their political implications and potentials, and the role they play in theory itself. What is the place of conflict in politics? Is it an exception, an interruption in the regular flow of things, an anomaly to be played out or resolved? Or is conflict the very precondition for political thought and action? How are we ruled and constituted through and by conflict? The present political moment in the U.S. seems to exemplify the reduction of social conflict to defunct liberal multiculturalism, on the one hand, and to nationalist xenophobia and its quest for unity beyond class antagonisms, on the other. However, could social conflict be theorized otherwise? In this seminar, we will explore the ways in which Western philosophy has conceptualized the modern subject as conflicted, perhaps even as predicated on a certain internal conflict. Articulating the specific forms of these inner conflicts and their political effects (particularly in terms of race and gender), we will examine how this conflicted subject is mirrored in Western theorizations of the public sphere as conflicted and how these in turn have given rise to the impasse of articulating political communities either as unified and antagonistic or as chaotic multitudes and crowds. We will further examine whether there exist alternative possible conceptions of conflict that allow a different perception of the many beyond these forms. How may conflict produce communication or change without falling into the traps of the regulated movement of the dialectics, the annihilating motion of war or the stalemate of stasis? In exploring these topics, we will pay special attention to the role that conflict plays in theory itself and to theory’s self-perception as advancing by way of conflict. Readings may include: Hobbes, Rousseau, Burke, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Schmitt, Arendt, Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, Wael Hallaq, Ernesto Laclau, Wendy Brown and Jasbir Puar. |
| COM LIT 210 | THE GLOBAL AND THE UNIVERSAL | SPIVAK, G. | In the contemporary world, it has become very important for us to be able to distinguish between "global" and "universal." This course will try to confront this problem through cartography, fiction, film, and political writing. One of my interests for the last decade or so has been to look at the word "Development." This has led me to the word "Research," in what is universally referred to as "R&D," that is to say "Research and Development." - "Development" is global. Global democracy is a declared aim. What is the relationship between "Development" and democracy in the context of the universal/global split? We will connect to the fact that democracy as bodycount majority requires the presence of a democratic society. I prefer "general to "universal." All human social groups, including children as a separate social group, think that something resembling the sphere of life they consider "experience" applies to the generality of humankind: however vaguely defined or not defined at all. We have to work with this if we want to consider what to do with universals, rather than concern ourselves with a critique of the imposition of Eurocentric universals globally. If tracking the universalizable without universalizing is an approach, who can collectively teach or learn this approach? We require uniformity for the functioning of democratic structures and ethical obligations. Statistics are not unnecessary for the operation of social justice. In this context, we have to think how the everyday "supplements" these requirements. This will oblige us to ask the question: who is the generalized subject or "I" of our classroom? I will consider the subaltern, those who are being globally denied the right to intellectual labor, today and for millennia, and what our obligation is when we generalize from our own limited context. Disability as part of the definition of the democratic subject, and the fact that the "present" continually vanishes will be issues in our class. A one-page reaction paper to the day's reading or viewing must be submitted by 5pm the day before. The final paper will be 13 pages excluding a research bibliography. No incompletes. Lecture Dates:
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| COM LIT 210 | PHENO SPIRIT 1 | MALABOU, C. | This course will be devoted to a reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (in A.V. Miller's translation) in its integrality over two years. This spring, picking up the most significant passages in each section, we will read the Preface, the Introduction, Consciousness and Self Consciousness. This class has two main objectives:
This year's leading thread will be « Subjectivity and Death ». |
| COM LIT 210 | BLACK FEMINIST THEORY AND BLACK FEMINIST CRITICAL PRAXIS | KEIZER, A | Prof. Arlene R. Keizer, Comparative Literature, English, and African American Studies This graduate seminar delves deeply into established and new work in black feminist theory. We will read significant portions of five major texts: Hortense Spillers’ collection Black, White, and In Color, Nicole Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination, Michelle Wright’s Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, and Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance. Each week, seminar members will discuss the critical/theoretical texts in relation to a literary work, an experimental film, a performance, or a work of visual art. In week 4, students will be expected to choose the subject of their own black feminist investigation, which need not have been written, created, or performed by a black woman artist/writer. Significant portions of the second half of the class will be devoted to work-shopping students’ drafts. This course may be taken as a seminar or pro-seminar. |