Instructor: Tanya Efremova

Fashion is the epitome of our yearning for the new and yet it always repeats itself. What is at stake in these repetitions? This course explores fashion as a means of processing history and time, a vehicle both activating and producing cultural memory. Building on Diana Taylor’s idea of the archive and the repertoire, we will see how the history of fashion is just as much about novelty as it is about a negotiation between the present and the past and the performance of cultural memory. Starting from Coco Chanel’s project of styling the nation and the not-so-new Dior’s New Look we will move to contemporary reflections on the 60s and sartorial obsessions with retro and vintage in the age of Instagram. While the vogue has been deliberately constructed as a quintessentially French phenomenon, we will transit from Paris to New York, Nubia, and Deli, making a few stops in post-Soviet Moscow and Tbilisi. Rather than a depository of styles, fashion will be approached as an arena for performance and reinvention of nationhood and gender, local memory and practices of international consumption. The class has a Digital Humanities component and will challenge you to present content on the publishing Internet platform Scalar. You will learn to annotate images and videos online, will write weekly blog posts, as well as have a choice of presenting your final paper in a form of a multimedia digital piece.

Instructor: Ludwig Schmitz 

Utopia, meaning “no place” in Greek, is the antonym of dystopia, or “bad place”; these concepts tell us that the opposite of a bad place is a place that doesn’t exist. Ever since social philosophers in the 18th and 19th centuries began to present “scientific” arguments why a “good” society must look a certain way, the adjective “utopian” has often been used to deride plans for society that were “unrealistic” because they rejected such arguments. These days, utopia is thus rarely treated as a serious idea. Dystopian fiction, on the other hand, appears to be a defining genre of our time. Ironically, dystopian critiques of the present often describe what would follow if we don’t begin to act on our ideals; in other words, if we aren’t more utopian. The opposites are thus confusingly similar: Plato’s perfect city state was, arguably, realized in the totalitarian states of the 20th century; conversely, the scariest dystopias are not the most obviously gruesome, but the ones that most resemble perfectly planned and organized societies. In this course we will analyze and compare examples of utopia and dystopia to gauge what these modes of representing “society” offer our contemporary political imagination. While most assigned materials are literary and theoretical, students are invited to bring examples in any media to class to expand our discussion. We will read, for example: Plato, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, William Morris, Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz, Fredric Jameson, George Orwell, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Karin Boye, and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Instructor: Wendy Lotterman

In this course we will examine how the law is broken – i.e., the actions that transgress it, and the revisions that discredit its legitimacy. We will look at the obsession with wrongful conviction through the genre of true crime (Serial, American Crime Story) and ask: how does a fervent pursuit of the “true” criminal reinforce the authority of the law itself? What kind of criminal solicits the reader’s identification or sympathy? And how is morality naturalized through differential sentencing practices that tell us what is bad and what is worse? In order to disidentify with the “mystical foundations” of the law’s authority (Jacques Derrida) we will look at instances in which that authority breaks beneath the force of social movements and reinterpretations of the constitution (slavery, DOMA, disenfranchisement). We will examine how the law defines and redefines its subjects, looking especially at the U.S. Naturalization act of 1906 and its struggle to classify whiteness (US v. Baghat Singh Thind and Ozawa v. US). In addition to addressing modern “cancel culture” and public adjudication by social and cultural boycott, we will also turn our attention to contemporary turns in criminality, such as the emerging case of “ecocide” (Bolsonaro, Trump) and the personification of land (Ganges River). Writers and materials will include: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dean Spade, US v. Bhagat Singh Thind, Ta-Nahisi Coates, Carl Schmitt, Rob Nixon, and more. Students will analyze a criminal case of their choice - from the news or popular media - with interpretive strategies developed in the course.

Instructor: Shirin Nadira

Food plays a central role in ordering the rhythms of individual, familial, and communal life — think comfort food, soul food, the Proustian madeleine. Consequently, how we think and talk about food is intimately related to how we construct ideal and abject bodies at the level of both the individual and the body politic, from the myth of the savage cannibal to the concept of the “melting pot.” Metaphors of eating and cooking have long served as key cultural tropes for conceptualizing the management of social difference, the boundaries between inside/outside and self/other, and processes of reading and thinking. Course Objectives Through close readings of literary and critical texts, we will broaden our understanding of foodways, the various intersections between food and culture. We will analyze the material histories of food objects, which reveal how contemporary culinary cultures have been shaped by the dynamics of colonialism, immigration, urbanization, and global capitalism. We will also unpack how metaphors of taste, hunger, and consumption illuminate contemporary issues including: the power dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality; the unequal distribution of lack and plenty; the environmental consequences of our dietary habits; cultural homogenization and hybridity; and the political unconscious of food porn and culinary tourism. On the Menu: textual selections from the Bible and Qur’an, Bourdieu, Brillat-Savarin, Mary Douglas, Derrida, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Montaigne, Plato, and Sidney Mintz; fiction by Paolo Bacigalupi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Toni Morrison, Mo Yan, and Ruth Ozeki; films including Jiro Dreams of Sushi, Babette’s Feast and The Lunchbox; the Netflix series adaptation of Samurai Gourmet; and art by Andy Warhol and Kara Walker.