Instructor: Prof. Jay Garcia

Diaries and diaristic writing. Place of the diaristic in literary studies. Barthes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Sontag, Hans Keilson, Christopher Isherwood, among others. Full description to come.

Instructor: Smaran Dayal

Since the premiere of the Marvel blockbuster movie Black Panther in 2018, the genre of Afrofuturism or Black science fiction has become an integral part of mainstream American popular culture and public intellectual debate. However, even as Black Panther has experienced this unprecedented box-office success and enthusiastic worldwide reception, something that continues to receive less attention—and at times even goes unnoticed—are this genre’s literary roots. This course offers a robust introduction to Afrofuturism in literature, film, TV, and critical discourse. We will look at the definitional debates around Afrofuturism in texts such as: Mark Dery’s Black to the Future (1994) and Ytasha Womack’s essays on Afrofuturism; the novels and short stories of Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler; the films of Jordan Peele; recent Black speculative TV series such as Lovecraft Country; and contemporary literary and cultural criticism on Afro-diasporic science fiction. In particular, this course will raise questions of form and genre: What is speculative or science fiction? What kinds of cultural and political critique does Afrofuturism make possible that realist and modernist forms cannot? Likewise, we will turn to histories of settler colonialism, slavery, indigeneity, and racism in the Americas, and inquire into the ways in which Afrofuturist literature activates and reframes these histories in ways that other genres have not—or cannot.

Instructor: Giancarlo Tursi

Borrowing from black American writer bell hooks’ study of the intersection of class and race, Class Matters (2010), this course will explore the intersection of class and education, drawing on the works of a diverse body of thinkers across languages and cultures. A driving question will be: Is social class something to be left at the door of the classroom, or can an attunement to it inform our practices as educators and students in a creative and political way? With bell hooks, we will explore not only the intersection of class and race, but also the educational policies that have historically worked to impede the access of people of color to higher education. With French novelists Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis we will explore the intersection of class, gender, and sexuality. With French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and American sociolinguist William Labov, we will explore the notion of “distinction” and the way class gets encoded into certain linguistic traits (accents, dialects, etc.) that education typically sees as its task to suppress. With Italian novelist Elena Ferrante and Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa, we will explore the psychological damage these acts of censorship and self-censorship can wreak upon speakers of delegitimized languages. With Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci we will explore the role of the intellectual in a classist society. Finally, with French philosopher Jacques Rancière and Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, we will explore alternative modes of pedagogy that attend to questions of class, rather than wash over them. We will also watch several films and series (Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, Saverio Costanzo’s TV adaptation of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend ) that stage this confrontation between class and the classroom. In a time when questions over the rising cost of education and the crippling effect of student debt are ever more at the forefront of national debate, it seems we can only benefit from an investigation such as this.

Instructor: Christina Chalmers

Transmission: “sending across”, transfer, passage, passing, conveyance, mediation. The millennium bug, radio transmitters in Honduras installed by the United Fruit company, secret codes, private and public languages, the colonial standard of English, the taboo on cruising, needles in bathrooms in the 1990s, fibre-optic cables, liquid crystals, radio waves, the writing of wills, mimesis and reproduction, broadcasts. These are some few of the associations that come to mind when thinking about “transmission”, above and beyond the recent uptake of the word during the pandemic. The recent period has exemplified how lines of transmission order space and time. The pandemic has re-ordered the private and public, the relations between permitted and forbidden spaces, and the global movements of the economy, in an effort to stave off the transmission of Sars-Cov-2, with closures following its transmission patterns. But other forms of transmission – such as the transmission of wealth, assets and property in the family, as well as cultural and group belonging – have long ordered the sequencing of time, and the ways this is anticipated and experienced. The necessity for the instantaneous transmission of data across large spaces – via fibre-optic cables and the liquid crystals in screens – organises material and digital worlds. This course looks at the history of the concept of transmission, through its reference to media history – in radio, TV and mechanical reproduction (print, photography) – but also its varied reference to viral contagion, psychoanalysis, linguistics and lines of property transmission within forms of kinship such as the nuclear family. The course seeks to interpret its objects through an analysis of gender, and to probe the “symptoms” of transmissions – or the lack of symptoms in the enigma of so-called “asymptomatic” transmissions – that subtend our lives. The necessity to balance between the withdrawal from lines of circulation, the refusal to transmit or be transmitted to – remaining “pure”, safe and uncontaminated by outside influences because of the perils of infection, invasion, or corruption – and the need to communicate and copy, forming lines of “transfer” and passage, play out in many different spheres. The course will touch on dynamics of family-building, colonial imposition, pandemic responsiveness, theories of reproduction, and TV wavelengths. We will seek to build a multivalent understanding of the concept, showing both its theorisation and material history.

Instructor: Ârash Aminian Tabrizi

“Who are you?” Here is the question that one—you, she, they, or I—is asked every day, everywhere. Be it on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or on dating and hook-up apps such as Tinder, Grindr, Hinge, and Her, be it in university applications and job interviews, in artistic practices and journalistic productions, or else when it comes to political activism and the moral values attached to it, one indeed has to introduce themselves, to say and show who (or perhaps what) they are as legibly and recognisably as possible. However, these expressions of the self often fall short of conveying, through their formatted forms, the complexity of what (or who) is being expressed, to the point of becoming mere cliché. Such commonplace narratives and images one shares with the world in turn shape one’s self and one’s relationships with others and the world that thereby become experientially poorer. This formatting, which some learn and excel at, remains for many unconscious, anchored as they are in the belief that they communicate the truth of their selves. This class, instead of studying the “self” as a stable and easily definable entity, will look at cultural productions in which a form is given to express its inherent multifacetedness, its fundamental scattering in time, space, life, death, sensation, sex, language, history, nature, etc. To do so, besides some theoretical texts (Agamben, Améry, Wendy Brown, Freud, Lyotard, Marie Moran, Gayle Rubin), we will examine the ways in which the shattering of the self comes to be formed and rendered, often experimentally, in short stories (Blanchot, Lispector), several novellas and novels (Beckett, Büchner, Carson, Cixous, Guibert, Rawicz, Sartre, Juliana Spahr), a screenplay (Duras), an autobiographical account (Wojnarowicz), poetry collections and poems (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Toi Derricotte, Eve Ewing, Rob Halpern, Canisia Lubrin, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Percy B. Shelley), an interactive graphic novel (Marietta Ren), a few speculative essays (Derrida, Haraway, Saidiya Hartman, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy), and a couple of albums (Björk, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). Students will have the chance to produce a creative project of their own that could be autobiographical or not, fictional or not, and that could resort to any modes and mediums of expression they see fit.