2020-2021

showcase the displacements and migrations that characterize the era of advanced global capitalism. Fleeing economic, social, and climatological collapse, migrants hardly find a second home; they become refugees without refuge. The limits on their flourishing extend far beyond the national borders that they cross in search of livable life. Wherever they go, they are discriminated and psychologically segregated by discourses of race nationalism, discourses in which migrations give rise to races. This course will focus on this process of migrant racialization-all the more pressing in light of current world events-with a curriculum that includes works by Weber, Simmel, Smohalla, Benedict Anderson, Anzaldúa, Appadurai, Brathwaite, Walter Benjamin, Celan, Derrida, Eggers, Ghosh, Le Guin, Glissant, Vine Deloria Jr., Woody Guthrie, Mbembe, Haraway, Tsing, Giddens, Negri and Hardt, Jason Moore, Bhabha, August Wilson, Sterling Brown, Big Bill Broonzy, Jacob Lawrence, Miguel Méndez, Mary Louise Pratt, Momaday, Silko, Canclini, Karen Tei Yamashita, Heise, Gikandi, Schmidt-Camacho, Fields and Fields, Bonilla-Silva, and Massey, in addition to film screenings and field exercises.

This course reads works of postcolonial literature and theory in order to consider the entanglements of the figures of "women" and "natives" in colonial as well as postcolonial discourse. We will discuss topics such as the persistent feminization of the profane, degraded, and contagious bodies of colonized natives; representations of women as both the keepers and the victims of "authentic" native culture; the status (symbolic and otherwise) of women in anti-colonial resistance and insurgency; and the psychic pathologies (particularly nervous conditions of anxiety, hysteria, and madness) that appear repeatedly in these works as states to which women and/as natives are especially susceptible. Authors may include Ama Ata Aidoo, Hélène Cixous J.M Coetzee, Maryse Condé, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Mahasweta Devi, Assia Djebar, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, Silvia Federici, Nuruddin Farah, Bessie Head, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Tayeb Salih, Ousmane Sembène, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

When Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey established the Universal Negro Improvement Association, he at once catalyzed a global mass movement for racial equality, projected a new Black diasporic identity, and redrew the fault-lines of modern racial politics. He also created the organizational and ideological framework for a global Black literature. Poets, workers, and political organizers from across the Black Diaspora sent both poetic and prosaic expressions of race-consciousness to the pages of Garvey's newspaper Negro World. These writers and activists challenged the legitimacy of world white supremacy, developed new modes of transnational racial affiliation, and enshrined Africa as the normative symbolic center of global Black politics. Despite its historical importance, however, Garveyism occupies an ambiguous place in African American studies. Controversies that trace back to the inception of UNIA, in addition to the loss of the organization's records, have impeded a full reckoning with the movement's global impact. Nonetheless, the great multivolume anthology of UNIA papers edited by Robert A. Hill, in addition to recent revisionist scholarship, suggest unexplored avenues of inquiry. The history of Garveyism, it seems, remains unfinished. "Poetry for the People" will introduce students to the real and imagined worlds of Garveyist Pan-Africanism, and explore the legacies of Garvey's movement for contemporary debates on race, empire, nationalism, and the politics of culture.

What does it mean to designate “structure” as the operative force in discrimination against categories of person—as in appeals to structural racism? And how can we approach this question by attending to aesthetic uses of structure and form, especially as these have been understood in such paradigms as structuralism and recent literary formalisms? How do we read for structure, in reading for racism and for systematic discrimination on other bases?

We’ll focus on intersections of race, gender, and class (in U.S. contexts) as these categories have been reconfigured in the past half century or so. To explore appeals to structure, we’ll consider definitions of literary and aesthetic form, debates about structure/agency, and questions of individual and collective action as mediated by institutions. Readings will balance theory with examples drawn from fiction, documentary film, built form, and other media. Throughout, we’ll pay particular attention to problems of structure construed as problems of narrative, as we develop sharper terms for understanding how discrimination proceeds structurally.

This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works.

What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capital? To better answer this, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around affect, climate change, human rights and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to outline its possible futures.

We begin by surveying the trajectories of the field, particularly as it developed around debates on revolution or compromise, cosmopolitanism, the psychology of colonialism, anti-colonial historiography, and the aesthetics of dislocation/diaspora/exile. Alongside this, we consider the nagging sense within the field of its own precariousness, and the disciplinary revival of the category of “world literature”.

We will read works by David Palumbo-Liu, Debjani Ganguly, Sara Ahmed, Amitav Ghosh, David Scott, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Chinua Achebe, Arundhati Roy, Richard Powers, Arun Kolatkar, and M’NourbeSe Philips.

In this Big Problems course on the literature of migration, students will analyze and create narratives about human beings moving across time and place, crossing borders both literal and metaphorical. We will consider the lives, perspectives, and voices of characters who are forged and re-forged by their cultural, linguistic, and familial contexts. Migration itself represents a physical relocation; writing about migration both expresses and requires an intellectual relocation. We will examine carefully questions of audience: for whom does the literature of migration exist, other members of migrant communities? Hosts? Both? What are the motivations for the work; does the literature of migration accelerate a sense of belonging, issue challenges, create a new form of hybrid identity? Does it keep a record that’s retrospective about the past, and/or contain in its very language the present tense? What does it ask or suggest about our future?

This is a multi-genre course, in which we will read fiction, poetry, and non-fiction about migration. Students will write both critical and creative projects, and research will be a key component of the course, making use of nearby archives and guest visits. Weekly readings include texts from Euripides’ Medea to Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, and will guide our consideration not only of how to read the literature of migration, but also of how to tie research into critical and creative projects on migration.

This course explores the critical potential and limitations of a few key sociological approaches to literature, working with the literary scene of the 1890s as our case. We will focus on Bourdieu's theorization of the field of cultural production; Foucault's analytics of power/knowledge and discursive formations; and recent efforts by Moretti and others to import geographic, social network, and evolutionary models into literary studies.

The question of “race” and racial others in US fiction has troubled the form since its emergence, but in the 21^st century fiction has tackled particularly thorny issues. The debates in contemporary critical race theory have both criticized and maintained the categories of race and ethnicity in novels and short fiction, and longstanding debates in canonization have demanded rethinking what “ethnic” fiction is capable of achieving. This class will read US ethnic novels and short stories of the last twenty years to conceptualize the shifting categories of race and ethnicity, paired with critical and theoretical works in critical race studies. Further, we will address the continuing importance of the historical novel and genre fiction to the study of race and ethnicity. The syllabus may include works by Paul Beatty, Lise Erdrich, Myriam Gurba, Mat Johnson, Stephen Graham Jones, lê thi diem thúy, Carmen Maria Machado, Salvador Plascencia, Colson Whitehead, and Karen Tei Yamashita.

Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries - not to mention a thriving "Janeite" fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen's completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include Sara Ahmed, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.