Sze Wei Ang
“Reading Claims of Justice”
Department of Comparative Literature
In this class, students will explore cross-cultural representations of ethical claims in ethnic US and South East Asian literatures in English. During a historical moment that grapples with what seems to be an increase in religious and ethnic violence, literature and the literary critic can offer models for how we understand violence, suffering, or the possibility of reconciliation. But this course also opens up the question of how we read different modes of the “ethical.” Can literature be said to represent “justice” or claims of justice? And consequently then, how do reading practices that privilege the question of ethics help us rethink literary form, especially in literature from different cultural or national contexts? If ethics is historically conditioned, what is the process of translation? Essays on the relation between ethics, literature, and literary criticism will also form part of the class syllabus.
Maya Boutaghou
“Theories of Feminism in the Arab World”
Department of Women’s Studies
This course will present, in a historical perspective, different moments of feminist theory in the Arab world. The beginnings of modern feminism in the Arab world are perhaps the main revolution accomplished by the Nahda (a 19th century modernization movement). We shall thus discuss the link between the modern birth of feminism and some essays on the Muslim education of women such as Rafi Rifaa al-Tahtawi’s inaugural work The Emancipation of Muslim Woman. Most male writers of this period sought to emancipate women in order to make the Arab community stronger by providing better education to its members. Some years after this first educational movement, that has its equivalent in India at the same period, we can witness the emergence of assertive female writers, such as Mayy Ziyadah. With her the education of women induces new paradigms and the birth of a real feminist movement which denounces the narrowness of the male voices of the Nahda. Later on historical events such as the Algerian war afforded personalities like Assia Djebar an opportunity to leave the harem and become committed feminist writers. Finally we shall analyze a famous essay by Nawal El-Saaadawi, The Hidden face of Eve, in which the author examines the link between sexuality and feminism in a revolutionary manner.
Greg Cohen
“Minor Cinemas, the Transnational, and Spatial Thought in Latin America”
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
This graduate seminar takes Latin American independent cinema of the 1960s and 70s as a point of departure for exploring what has been called the “spatial turn” in critical theory. Broadly construed as a major shift in focus and trajectory first materializing around the turn of the sixties and intensifying after the upheavals of 1968, the spatial turn describes a move away from questions of time and history towards those of space and geography. Somewhat in the manner of a workshop, we will aim to develop a broadly de-centered version of the spatial turn by revisiting some of its foundational texts through the prism of Latin American films. Parings might include Pino Solanas and Octavio Getino’s film The Hour of the Furnaces with the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationists; Brazilian director Andrea Tonacci’s Bang Bang! with Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life; Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna’s film Iracema with Frederic Jameson’s The Geopolitical Aesthetic; or Miguel Littín’s film The Jackal of Nahueltoro with Michel Foucault’s essays “Of Other Spaces” and “Questions of Geography.”
Marcela Fuentes
“Transnational Performance in Theory and Practice”
Department of Theater
In an age of transnational media and capital, theories of social process invite us to trace the way in which social actors, artists, and activists also work transnationally, creating communities of empathy and networks of alliance and antagonism that cannot be contained within the logic of the nation-state. This course examines performances in transnational context to explore how they produce the materialization of places and bodies in the time-space of the global. What forms of citizenship and alternative community are enacted in live performances that gesture at larger sites of action? How do performances work within and outside the channels opened up by transnational institutions? In what way do theories and performance practices offer new ways of thinking about locality and timing under new spatiotemporal configurations? Investigating processes of transnational cultural production, we seek to redefine the ways in which performance is thought of as a local event.
Sonali Pahwa
“Transnational Performance in Theory and Practice”
Department of Theater
In an age of transnational media and capital, theories of social process invite us to trace the way in which social actors, artists, and activists also work transnationally, creating communities of empathy and networks of alliance and antagonism that cannot be contained within the logic of the nation-state. This course examines performances in transnational context to explore how they produce the materialization of places and bodies in the time-space of the global. What forms of citizenship and alternative community are enacted in live performances that gesture at larger sites of action? How do performances work within and outside the channels opened up by transnational institutions? In what way do theories and performance practices offer new ways of thinking about locality and timing under new spatiotemporal configurations? Investigating processes of transnational cultural production, we seek to redefine the ways in which performance is thought of as a local event.
Sarah Valentine
“Second World Postcolonialism and the Poetics of Identity: New Approaches to Russian Literature”
Department of Slavic Languages
In this course we will examine contemporary Russian poets as writers of a defunct Second World and explore how that plays into issues of aesthetics, poetics and concepts of identity both for themselves and their poetic personae. Theoretical perspectives include transnationalism, postcolonialism, post-socialism, and gender theory.
Travis Workman
“Empire and the Human Sciences”
Department of Asian Languages & Cultures, Department of Comparative Literature
This course will consider the positing of “man” as subject and object of philosophical discourse and literary representation, and as economic and political species. With the rise of anthropocentric and humanist world-views in modernity, how is “man” figured as the thinker and creator of modern society? Furthermore, how is this universality of the human rendered compatible or incompatible with the division of the species into races, cultures, genders, classes, and nations? In order to approach the historical aspect of these questions, we will examine humanist and cosmopolitan ideas as they operated in processes of nation-state formation and modes of colonial governmentality. Our main concern will be how philosophical and literary representations of humanity have converged with political power, and to what degree criticisms of humanism have been able to overcome the uses and abuses of species logic in the formation of imperial polities. Although the methodology of the course is informed by colonial discourse analysis in the post-colonial vein, we will also delve more broadly into the intellectual history of anthropological thought. Our main historical context will be 20th century East Asia, but we will draw comparisons with humanist discursive formations in other contexts. Those with expertise in the history of other colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial contexts will be encouraged to contribute actively to the comparative aspect of the course.