2018-2019

Much has been written about the possibility (or impossibility) of creating an integrated political schema that incorporates living status, not species boundary, as the salient distinction between person and thing. In this course, we will explore how biopolitical and posthumanistic scholars like Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Jane Bennett, Cary Wolfe, and Donna Haraway have acknowledged (and advocated transcending) the anthropocentric ümwelt, to borrow Jakob von Üexküll’s influential term. In parallel with our theoretical readings, we will explore how actual legal systems have incorporated the nonhuman, with a particular focus on Anglo-American and transnational law. Our goal is to develop our own sense of an applied biopolitics—whether to our own research, to future legislation and jurisprudence, or both. This course fulfills part of the KNOW Core Seminar requirement to be eligible to apply for the SIFK Dissertation Research Fellowship. No instructor consent is required, but registration is not final until after the 1st week in order to give Ph.D. students priority.

This course explores the politics of ‘bad’ taste by carefully investigating scenes of aesthetic pleasure with orthogonal, if not oppositional, relations to traditional Anglo-American artistic standards. Taking Susan Sontag’s famous 1964 essay as a starting point and moving forwards and backwards in time, students will be asked to study critical texts and works of art having to do with dandyism, kitsch, camp, racial or afro-kitsch, craft, and rasquachismo. In each of these cases, the relation between aesthetics and group identities based in gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and race will be examined. Among others, students will encounter work by Oscar Wilde, Christopher Isherwood, Joe Brainard, Kevin Killian, Clement Greenberg, Manthia Diawara, Tavia Nyong’o, Spike Lee, Kalup Linzy, Anne Cvetkovich, Allyson Mitchell, Diana Taylor, Nao Bustamante, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto. Students who take this course will learn to use formal analysis to interrogate connections between particular works of art and aesthetic categories associated with discrete sociopolitical positions.

In this course we will read and reflect on the lyrics and the letters of Emily Dickinson, within and against a number of critical contexts. For the first few weeks we will acquaint ourselves with her corpus, reading deeply and widely her poetry and prose. We will then work to contextualize Dickinson’s writing within the culture, history, and politics of the mid- l9th century, focusing particularly on issues of gender, professional authorship, and the culture of domesticity. Finally, we will consider the heated critical debates surrounding editorial practices, debates about editions, and the fetishizing of manuscripts and the “electronic” Dickinson archive. (Poetry)

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s most important essay, A Defence of Poetry(1821), ends with an audacious claim: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” By this he affirms that poetry and the imagination impact (“legislate”) social conditions, even though poets rarely receive the credit. But what about that last term, “the world”? Shelley is also commenting on the central topic we’ll examine in this course: the Romantic idea that imaginative literature makes it possible to think of the world as a whole. This seminar presents major works, figures, and literary forms of Romanticism as a set of engagements with early globalization. We begin with Scottish Enlightenment ideas about cosmopolitanism and “world citizenship,” and trace the development, continuance, and resistance to these ideas in writing about the Atlantic slave trade, domestic and overseas colonial relations, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, travel and tourism, and the Ottoman Empire. (Poetry, 1650-1830)

To many, Bathsheba is simply the nude who seduced David. The connotations of being a Jezebel are strong enough that a popular feminist website re-appropriates the insult. Yet the biblical texts themselves make it difficult to imagine female characters as types, or the violence with which they are often associated as comprehensible. Furthermore, Hebrew Bible figures have often been taken up as sites to explore contemporary questions relating to gender and violence. Did Dinah 'ask for it'? Does Ruth's story celebrate the refugee and mother or justify a colonial politics of assimilation? In this course, students will examine literary works that reuse difficult portions of biblical narrative and challenge readers to reassess biblical violence and its legacies. By engaging with both more popular extended rewritings like The Red Tent and world-literary political works like A Grain of Wheat, this course will reconsider biblical women and the variety of problematic and productive ways they may be appropriated in fiction and in popular culture.

What does it mean for a biblical character to be "fraught with background," in Erich Auerbach's evocative phrase? How can we approach the Bible's dense, terse, paratactic prose as literary interpreters? What are the conventions and restrictions of biblical poetry, and how does the text move within these rules? In this course, students will read key narrative and poetic texts from the Hebrew Bible, de-familiarize traditional stories, acquire tools of literary analysis particular to biblical poetics, and ask questions about the literary legacy of this complicated, messy collection. Along the way, we will treat important comparative literary issues the Hebrew Bible highlights, including distinctions between history and fiction, literary genre, biblical translation, and notions of canon and tradition. Though our primary focus will be on the biblical text itself, our reading will be aided by foundational texts on biblical poetics (including works by Auerbach, Alter, Sternberg and Kawashima) and more recent examples of feminist, queer-theoretical, postmodern and postcolonial biblical criticism.

This is an introductory course on biopolitics. The class will approach this Foucauldian category as both a “style of thought” and as a mode of governmentality. Key questions we will return to throughout the quarter include: What forms of knowledge-power are mobilized to conceive of life statistically and/or at the level of population? How might biopolitics transform our understanding of sexuality, race, and class, as well as their disciplinary systems? And, finally, what does it mean to politicize “life itself”? In order to get a better handle on Michel Foucault’s foundational formulation of biopolitics in the final chapter of The History of Sexuality, we will spend the first two weeks tracing the concept’s prehistory in the work of Charles Darwin and the life philosophers of the Nineteenth Century before turning to contemporary theorizations of biopolitics by feminist, critical race, disability, and queer scholars. These recent interventions alert us to the different instantiations or modalities of biopolitics in relation to one’s geo-political location and/or subject-position. For some, biopolitics has the potential to foster new forms of life and capacities; for others, this politics of life is more likely to be encountered as a necropolitics. We will therefore spend the final few weeks of the quarter thinking about the relation between life and death under biopolitics. How might the biopolitical revision of life alter our understanding of death itself?

This graduate seminar focuses on the conventions of trauma theory but mainly focuses on components: the incident, the event, the archive, witnessing, the personal and the impersonal; reparation, the subordinated population. Theorists include Puar, Moten, Mbembe, Caruth, Freud, Fanon, Fonagy, Hartman, Luckshurst; artworks include material by Rankine, Wojnarowicz, Guzman, Kapil, Kane, and Pink. Students will have wide latitude for the kinds of teaching they choose to do in the class. A final project, creative with an essay or an essay is expected. (20th/21st)

Description: Drawing on trans studies, disability studies, histories of science, queer and postcolonial theory, this class contends with how bodies and bodies of knowledge change over time. Bodies of Transformation takes a historiographic approach to the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of corporeal meaning, practice and performance in the 19th and 20th centuries. Animating questions include: what is the corporeal real? how is race un/like gender? how does bodily transformation map the complex relationships between coercion and choice?

1970s feminist theory made a significant conceptual move in provisionally bracketing off biological sex from the historical/cultural work of gender. Feminist science fiction (in contrast), in its brief flourishing in the 70s and early 80s, finds its utopian moments in the biological, in genetic manipulation, reproductive technology, ecological forms of being and new bodies of a variety of kinds. This class will read science fiction, feminist theory and current critical work that concerns itself with biopolitics in order to ask questions about the divide between nature and culture, what’s entailed in imagining the future, what gender and genre might have to do with each other, and just what science fiction is and does anyway. Authors include: Le Guin, Russ, Butler, Piercy, Haraway, Rubin, Firestone. (Theory)