Elsa Chen
“The Globalization of Contemporary Art: Asian Perspectives”
Department of Art History
Late twentieth century has witnessed the rise of contemporary art industry. This course aims to look at how flourishing Asian contemporary art has been produced, reproduced and disseminated in the world contemporary art system. This course will try to understand how one of the biggest contemporary art industries, namely the biennale industry, works, and investigate how Asian contemporary art has been situated and circulated within this system. This will be done by exploring selected biennales held in different parts of the world and under similar or different persuasions and also by analyzing some specific work by a few internationally renowned artists of Asian descents who move inside and/or beyond the system.
Eulàlia Moles
“Contemporary Issues of Chicanas”
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
This seminar introduces students to key concepts related to the theoretical framework of globalization with a special emphasis on how it impacts Chicanas/Latinas. We will discuss how globalization and neoliberalist policies have a profound effect on the “new world border,” the femicide on the border, and (trans)national migration and its feminization in the 1990s in the rise of the global economic shifts. We will also carefully examine how transnational feminist decolonizing practices engage with different human rights frameworks in their pursuit of social justice in order to denounce and counteract both personal and structural violence. Different theories informing the emerging field of transnational studies will be explored in the light of the formation of transnational alliances based on the historical and contemporary geopolitical links in the Americas.
Eulàlia Moles
“Contemporary Issues of Chicanas”
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
This course introduces students to several topics directly impacting Chicanas/ Latinas in the present historical framework of globalization. We will specifically focus on the theme of violence to discuss the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, (trans)national migration, labor, the femicide on the border, health, and Chicana cultural practices. An integral part of the course will be devoted to examining the many different processes that transnational feminist decolonizing practices adopt to denounce, and counteract both personal and structural violence.
Babli Sinha
“The British Imperial Romance and its Critics”
Department of English
The imperial romance celebrated imperialism as standing for chivalry and civilization. It contrasted the colonizer and the colonized, associating the colonizer with cultural superiority and modernity and the colonized with superstition and primitivism. We will study some of the most influential and controversial texts and films from this genre produced in Britain from the 1890s to the 1940s and set in South Asia and South Africa. We will consider how they promoted colonial service and defended the British empire at a time when colonialism faced criticism at home and abroad.
Department of English. This course will simultaneously think about how these texts were received by their readers and viewers around the world. As these texts and films were disseminated, they prompted adaptations and the creation of new narratives about modernity. What did these readers find inspiring or offensive about these stories? How did they express their reactions? How did the story of imperialism and modernity change as a result of these responses? How did these stories affect the way in which we understand history and identity? Literature and film critiquing the imperial romance will also date from the 1890s to the 1940s. They will be accompanied by historical and theoretical readings. Texts include works by Anand, Kipling, Forster, Haggard, Plaatje, and Schreiner along with three films, King Solomon’s Mines, Gunga Din, and The Rains Came.