| Course | Title | Instructor | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| COM LIT 8 | CULTURES OF CITIES | DIMENDBERG, E. | This class will focus on urban novels by Andre Bely, Jonathan Lethem, Kobo Abe, Yashar Kemal, Raymond Queneau, Javier Marias, and Ricardo Piglia set in St. Petersburg, New York, Tokyo, Istanbul, Paris, Oxford, and Buenos Aires. We will explore the different possibilities of urban storytelling and the potential of the modernism and postmodernism to illuminate relations among the structures of the family, society, and politics. Readings by Charles Baudelaire, Franz Hessel, Georg Simmel, Lewis Mumford, Richard Sennett, Sharon Zukin, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and Rem Koolhaas will focus on the experiences of speed, crowds, luxury, ugliness, spectacle, and density in the modern city. Course assignments include take-home midterm and final research paper. |
| 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 60C | CULTURAL STUDIES | ABBAS, M. | Is it true that the value of cultural studies lies in its enlarged, non-elitist and inclusive notion of culture, where all marginalities can find a place in the academic curriculum? Is cultural studies a more populist, media-wise and sexy replacement for literary studies? While it is important for cultural studies to develop an enlarged and inclusive notion of culture where alternative positions can find a place, it is even more important for it to problematize the notion of culture itself. Cultural studies did not emerge only out of a sense that previous notions of culture have been privative and limiting -- ethnocentric, imperialistic, chauvinistic, racist and so on; it emerged also out of a sense that the very space of culture is somehow not what it used to be, that something has shifted. Cultural studies can therefore be regarded as an attempt to rethink the problematic place of culture today, by a study of its dis-locations. We have cultural studies because we do not know what or where culture is, even though a lot of things are carried out in its name. Through a discussion of different kinds of texts, images, and films, the course will introduce issues like ideology, ethnocentrism, media, race, ‘x-coloniality’, and gender that dis-placed our understanding of what culture is. |
| COM LIT 107 | GLOBALIZATION: SHIFTING PARADIGMS | AHMAD, A. | The term ‘globalization’ has become popular only over the past quarter century, since about 1990. By the end of the 20th century a decade later, ‘globalization’ had become one of the dominant terms for academic analyses, in the social sciences as much as in studies of culture, literature, film, media, ecology the arts and so on. It is also true, though, that the United States has been the world’s most globalized country in its very formation, with settlers and slaves arriving in the earliest phase, followed by migrants and refugees from all corners of the world over centuries, mostly at the expense of the original indigenous population. ‘Globalization’ can then be seen not as a phenomenon of just recent origin but as something much older that begins with the beginning of Europe’s world-wide colonial expansion several centuries ago. The course will be structured along these two emphases: (1) the historical processes that account for long-term but very unequal social, cultural and economic integration of the world across continents; and (2) the historical changes unfolding over the past few decades which are now seen as the main features of contemporary globalization. In other words, globalization is seen not as a static contemporary condition but a dynamic process involving continuous change. |
| COM LIT 132 | RESISTANCE LITERATURE | AHMAD, A. | Training a critical gaze at existing social realities has been one of the oldest vocations of the literary imagination. This may not involve direct advocacy of particular forms of resistance but there is almost always a utopian moment in literary texts, a reaching out toward something beyond what is represented, something better, an ‘otherwise’. In Western literature, conscious forms of resistance become more common after the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Rise of Realism as well as Romanticism. In the colonised zones, resistance tends to be focused as much against colonialism and racism as against the ills and anachronisms prevailing within those societies. We will read mostly poetry and fiction but also some critical writings. Much of the syllabus will be drawn from the so-called ‘Third World’ but we will also read some dissident texts from inside the Anglo-American zones. We will engage with seminal figures such as Cesaire (Martinique), Neruda (Chile) and Lu Xun (China) but it may also be interesting to read, as a single cluster, such feminist writers as Adrienne Rich (US), Assia Djebar (Algeria) and Michelle Cliff (Jamaica). In other words, World Literature as Resistance Literature. |
| COM LIT 132 | AVERSION TO POLITICS | TERADA, R. | Today "anti-political" sentiments are common globally: the sense that elections, legislative processes, and political candidates are inadequate, irrelevant, or even harmful to societies. In this class we'll explore the various things that these sentiments can mean in contemporary discourse, media, and literature. Anti-political stances may be part of neo-fascism and can express disdain for any aspiration to justice. They influence the rise of so-called "strong man" figures like Trump, Duterte, and Modi. They can also, separately, reflect legitimate discontents with what passes for justice and the desire for something better than just being governed. Marx was a critic of "politics." Direct action activism bypasses calling your congressman in favor of doing something ourselves. In many rural and urban areas social organization operates somewhat independently from national government; a political system is not an inevitable way of organizing community life. How should we think about aversion to politics in connection with racial, gendered, and sexual justice today, and in various parts of the world? The class will emphasize guest lectures, media, critical theory, feature films and documentaries, possibly including Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver, Sky Hopinka's Dislocation Blues (about Standing Rock), and Wang Bing's Three Sisters (a documentary located in Yunnan). As well as a midterm and final, requirements emphasize oral and written participation and collaboration in a friendly relaxed atmosphere. |
| COM LIT 190W | SPACE AND AFFECT IN CHINESE CINEMAS (ASIAN CIT ASIAN CIN) | ABBAS, M. | Walter Benjamin once described the city dweller as ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness’, reflecting the many facets of the city like a broken mirror. More and more, the city exists not just as a physical, political, and economic entity that can be mapped, but also as a cluster of images, a series of discourses, and a problematic experience of space. This course will focus on Chinese cities and cinemas. Through a discussion of films and theoretical texts, this course will study the relationship between a puzzling urban space and our often bizarre affective responses to such a space. The film makers discussed will include Wong Kar-wai, Jia Zhangke, Tsai Mingliang, Lou He, Zhang Yuan, and others. |
| COM LIT 210 | INFRASTRUCTURE | JOHNSON, A. | In the last two decades, an "infrastructural turn" has taken place in the social sciences, taking up infrastructure for the first time as a critical concept rather than a technical object. Rather than a study of particular electrical grids, sewage systems, roads or trains, this new work proposes to think infrastructure in an expanded sense. As a "theory-machine" infrastructures can help us think in both material and materialist terms — infrastructural systems not only occupy but indeed compose space, bearing weight, establishing connections, and structuring the built environment, the state, and the world-system. They are not only “things” but also about "relations between things." Infrastructures can also be understood to comprise social-material assemblages or "more-than-human" relations and can include things like organizational modalities, religious and family structures, race relations, patterns of affective labor, or cultural forms. This seminar is driven by the question of what it might mean to develop a thinking of infrastructure in the humanities. For this we will not only read many of the seminal texts specifically associated with this infrastructural turn (Brian Larkin, AbdouMaliq Simone), but also to go back to earlier texts that we might put into conversation with them (such as Henri Lefebre’s Critique of Everyday Life and Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life). |
| COM LIT 210 | FREUD | AMIRAN, E. | This course surveys the sacred groves of Sigmund Freud, our genius of the incestuous cannibal mind, or is it a dream and there’s an old man coming and a snake is saying something. Then you’re naked and you need to go away but you can’t, you’re in the force field of modernity. We will work through fundamental Freud, like Interpretation, Three Case Studies, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the essays on mourning and on repetition, without which the world we know (from Sophocles to trauma theory) would not exist. We will study fantasies of social origin—the bad Freud of Totem and Taboo—that connect with political theory today, aided by readings of Freudian paradigms of object relations and exchange. To develop this vision of the political, the course reads literary and visual works, including video, fiction, cartoons, and public architecture. While trying to concentrate on the high minded Freud overlooked by his animated detractors, we will also spend time in the lowlands, bogs, fens, and marshes in order to develop college teaching topics and strategies that exercise Freud. Readings include essays by Georges Bataille (especially Visions of Excess, The Accursed Share), Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (selections), Henry Darger art, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and other dream art, digital performance art by Stelarc, art and film by Dali and Bunuel, and secondary readings by Derrida, Massumi, Tate, Weber, and others. Presentations, written exercises, short seminar essays. |
| COM LIT 210 | PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT 2 | MALABOU, CATHERINE | This course is devoted to a reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (in A.V. Miller's translation) in its integrality over two years. This is the second year. Last year, we read the Preface, the Introduction, Consciousness and Self Consciousness. This year, we will study « Reason », « Spirit », « Religion », « Abolute Knowing ». The first part of the Phenomenology deals with the constitution of cognitive consciousness and self-consciousness, the second part of the Phenomenology is more specifically devoted to the way in which consciousness, reason, and spirit are confronted with historical events and political scenes, from ancient Greek democracy (Antigone) up to French Revolution (Terror). The last sections of the book analyse the relationships between religion and philosophy, and draw the conclusion that the latter only is able to provide us with a meaningful dialectical understanding of historical and political violence. This class has two main objectives. 1) Develop a familiarity with one of the most fundamental and influential texts of the philosophical tradition, and acquiring a satisfactory command of its main concepts. 2) Bring to light Hegel's anticipations of some central issues in contemporary thinking, including those raised by political resistance. This year's leading thread will be « Historical Awareness ». New students welcome. Attendance in last year’s class is absolutely not a requirement. |
| COM LIT 210 | PANAFRICANISM & POSTCOLONIALISM | SPIVAK, G. | PANAFRICANISM & POSTCOLONIALISM A Male Movement WEEK I Lynch, Hollis Ralph. Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot 1832-1912. New York [etc.]: Oxford U.P., 1967, chap. 1 (“The Negro World of the 19th Century and the Making of a Race Champion”). 8 p Shaw, Flora L. A Tropical Dependency. London: J. Nisbet & Co., Limited, 1905, p. 7, 200-203, 214-217, 274. 7p. Blyden, Edward W. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1994, pp. i-xv and “Ethiopia Stretching out her Hands unto God or Africa’s Service to the World,” “Africa and the Africans,” ---------. "Report on the Expedition to Falaba, January to March 1872. (With an Appendix Respecting Dr. Livingstone)." Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London 17, no. 2 (1872): 117-33. WEEK II Andrain, Charles F., “The Pan-African Movement: The Search for Organization and Community”, Phylon (1960), Vol. 23, No. 1 (1st Qtr., 1962), p. 5-17.? Shepperson, George, “Pan-Africanism and ‘Pan-Africanism’: Some Historical Notes”, Phylon (1960), Vol. 23, No. 4 (4th Qtr., 1962), p. 346-358. Makonnen, Ras. Pan-Africanism from Within. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, chap. 4 (“Washington, Dubois, Garvey and the West Indian Diaspora” 52-65), chap. 9 (“Blacks in Britain”123-149) and chap. 11 (“Pan-Africanism in Practice” 178-195). Stephens, Michelle Ann. Black Empire?: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, chap. 1 (pp. 35-55, “The New Wordly Negro: Sovereignty, Revolutionary Masculinity, and American Internationalism”). Du Bois, W. E. B, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out”, in Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro?: An Interpretation. New York: A. and C. Boni, 1925, p. 383-414. Irele, F. Abiola, “Utopia II,” in The African Scholar (forthcoming), photocopy will be provided. WEEK III Présence Africaine, Compte Rendu Complet, 355-369, N° Spécial Présence Africaine 8-9-10, 1956, Le Ier Congrès International des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs/ First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists (Paris - Sorbonne – 19-22 Septembre 1956) - Wright Richard, 1956, “Tradition and Industrialization. “The Plight of the Tragic Elite in Africa,” (pp. 355-369) - “Opening remarks,” (pp. 1-28) - Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture,” (pp. 122-131) - Aimé Cesaire, “Culture and Colonisation,” (pp. 193-229) - Baldwin, James. “Princes and Power.” Encounter, January 1957, 52–60. - Leopold Senghor, “The Spirit of Civilisation or the Laws of African Negro Culture,” (pp. 51-64) Suzanne Senghor (untranslated), 1941 (will be provided) Relevant chapter from Yohann Ripert’s dissertation (link will be provided) WEEK IV McKay, Claude, “Back in Harlem”, 95-115; “Harlem Shadows,”147-150; “When a Negro Goes Native,” 295-305; “The New Negro in Paris,” 306-323; “A Great Celebration,” 207-225; “Regarding Radical Criticism” 226-234, in A Long Way from Home. New York: Harvest Books, 1970. MacKenzie, Allen J, “Radical Pan Africanism in the 1930-s: A Discussion with C. L. R. James,” Radical History Review, 24, 1980, pp. 68-75. Boahen, A. Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, Introduction and Conclusion. DU BOIS, THE WORLD & AFRICA IS TOO LONG TO INCLUDE, BUT I KEEP IT AS BACKGROUND READING WEEK V Rama, Angel. The Lettered City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, p. #-s tbd. Fernández Retamar, Roberto, “Caliban,: in Caliban and Other Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. #-s tbd. An Eye on the Subaltern WEEK VI Khushwant Singh, Train to Pakistan (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2007). Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, distributed by Oxford University Press, 1981), Chapter 6; I will provide some snippets from the rest of the book. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis, and Development” (Paper presented at the Graduate Anthropology Seminar at Columbia University, 1916). http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_ambedkar_castes.html Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (New Delhi: Critical Quest, 2007). WEEK VII 3. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Dark Princess: A Romance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Dohra Ahmad, "'More Than Romance': Genre and Geography in Dark Princess," ELH 69.iii (2002), p. 775-803; Lala Lajpat Rai, The United States of America: A Hindu's Impressions, p. 387-end. . Mahasweta Devi, “Douloti the Bountiful,” in Imaginary Maps: Three Stories, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995). WEEK VIII Mariama Bâ, Une si longue lettre (Dakar: Nouvelles éditions africaines du Sénégal, 1980). __________ So Long a Letter, tr. Modupe? Bode?-Thomas (London: Heinemeann, 1981). Buchi Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (New York: G. Braziller, 1979). Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987); pg.s tbd; Assia Djebar, “Overture,” in Women of Algiers in their Apartment, tr. Marjolijn de Jager (Charlottesville: Univ. Of Virginia Press, 1992; Assia Djebar, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement : nouvelles (Paris: des femmes, 1980). Ali Mazrui, The African Condition: A Political Diagnosis. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980) pages tbd. Kazi Nazrul Islam, “Keno Kande paran . . .” (I will translate in class) WEEK IX Marta Traba, Conversación al sur (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1981) ;.Mothers and Shadows, tr. Jo Labanyi (London: Readers International, 1986; have asked colleague for good background essay WEEK X Public lecture: “Summing Up With Padmore” Class Reading: Padmore, George, Pan Africanism or Communism? The Struggle for Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1957. |