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SPRING 2004 |
CLT 602.01/EGL 606.01
Word,
Testament and Will: Postcoloniality and the Question of the “Premodern”
Milind Wakankar
This course takes as its point of departure Ranajit Guha’s recent reading of Hegel and Tagore, and in particular his insight that a fundamental feature of postcoloniality is the quest for alternative modes of historical memory. Indigenous (nationalist) historiography was inaugurated in India in the early 19C under the aegis of the colonial state; the premise behind this mode of historical narration, which remained influential through the colonial period and is still dominant today, was that the state as the ethical instantiation of the future was the ultimate goal of the nation in its moment of re-memoration. Taking his cue from Tagore, Guha stresses the need for “non-statist” forms of historical memory, arguing that the setting-to-work of historical truth in “literature” provides one possible alternative. This course will take Guha’s plea seriously and attempt a wide-ranging “reconstruction” of such sites of memory, taking into account such key moments as the work of autobiography in Brown, Stock and Lyotard’s Augustine, the structure of testimony in de Certeau’s account of Cusa and early medieval mysticism, systems of memory in Yates’s Giordano Bruno, the idea of figural humanity implicit in Auerbach’s account of “figura,” the historiographical critique of the Subaltern School of Indian historians, Spivak’s narrativization of the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, Chatterjee’s recent rewriting of Natalie Zemon Davis’s Martin Guerre, Dirks’s historical sociology of the postcolonial state, Gandhi’s “vernacular” exploration of “memory exercises,” Subrahmanyam’s revisionist life of Vasco da Gama, Derrida’s rigorous anti-figurality in his reading of Kant, Hegel and Heidegger in “Faith and Knowledge,” Anderson’s account of the emergence of the Word in print culture, and finally the Anglo-American debate around Mauss’s “Person” essay. Our endeavor throughout will be to imagine the premodern as “encrypted” within modern notions of interpretation as historicity. In particular, our attempt will be to conjure the non-figural (non-personological) image of a “testamentary” state in the premodern, one that departs both from “confessional” and “historical” notions of the state as the ethical horizon of hope.
Monday 3:50-6:40 p.m. Harriman Hall 115
CLT608.01/SPN612/EGL
608.01
“Memory, Bodies,
and Languages”
Beni Trigo
The human body is the focus of much literary and philosophical attention at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nowhere is this focus more visible than in the recent testimonial and autobiographical narratives or memoirs from the Americas. Recent works like Brown, by Richard Rodríguez, Waiting in the Wings, by Cherríe Moraga, The Accidental Asian by Eric Liu, and On Borrowed Words by Ilan Stavans explore the connection between bodies, language and memory, to suggest new ways of understanding America. .These authors pose and answer questions about the languages and memories (both primeval and modern) that constitute us as individuals and as collective, languages and memories that link and separate our bodies. In doing so, these authors challenge us to move beyond the tired myth of a Melting Pot and the accompanying threat of Balkanization. Instead, they point towards a more hopeful imagined community for America: a community at home with both the fluidity and reality of its borders, with the simultaneous physicality and abstraction of its bodies. Memories, Languages and Bodies meets the challenge posed by these writers. In this course we will examine examples of the writings involved in developing this emerging imagined community.
A body of criticism with an eclectic approach on this topic that transcends national, cultural, linguistic, sexual and racial boundaries is now commanding the attention of Latin American studies. Similarly there has been an interest in the ways memory, language and body intersect in the emerging fiction of Latino/a and Latin American writers. This course will also tap into this surging interest in this intersection in Latin American criticism and fiction.
Wednesday 3:50-6:40 p.m. Melville Library N 3062
CLT 608.02/EGL
608.02
“Trauma, Cinema and
Postcolonialism”
E. Ann Kaplan
This course will bring together psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourses to bear on select films dealing with catastrophic events. Acknowledging the consolidation of modernity with the twin developments of psychoanalysis and cinema at the turn of the 19th Century, the course will also focus on the conjunction of modernity with the high point of Western colonialism. The nexus of these developments radically changes how subjects view themselves in regard to culture, history, images and the imaginary. We will study how cultural displacement through immigration and diaspora, with their traumatic impacts in the post-colonial era, produces new subjects. But our focus will include subject-formations of Indigenous peoples as well as those of former colonial and colonizing subjects, as all of these are constituted by new political and social formations from the mid-20th Century to today. Case studies will be taken from international cinema about trauma. The role of cinema itself as it constitutes new subjects and knowledge about the Other will also be addressed.
We will situate each film studied in relation to a series of interdisciplinary texts and theories, starting with psychoanalytic theories of trauma but exploring also recent neuro-science trauma theories. Debates about trauma theory will be situated in their specific historical contexts so as to illuminate what is at stake in their formulation.
Theories include those by Freud, Melanie Klein, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Teresa Brennan, Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jennifer Biddle, among others.
Films by Renais, Herzog, Rachel Perkins, Costner, Obamsawin, Zhang Yimou, among others.
Tuesday 3:50-6:40 p.m. Humanities Institute E
4340
CLT
609.01/EGL 608.03
“Cultural Studies: Theories/Methods”
Ira
Livingston
Nick
Mirzoeff
A general introduction to theories, methods, and topics in Cultural Studies, co-taught by Ira Livingston (CLT, English) and Nick Mirzoeff (Art), also featuring sessions with visiting speakers in Postcolonial Studies (Dipesh Chakrabarty) and Science/Media/Literature (N. Katherine Hayles).
Tuesday 12:50-3:40 p.m. Humanities Institute E
4340
EGL 607
“Contemporary
British Writers: Caryl Phillips and Meera Syal”
Helen Cooper
Caryl Phillips and Meera Syal represent a contemporary generation of writers who grew up in England to parents who had emigrated from Britain’s former colonies. Phillips’ parents sailed from St. Kitts in the Caribbean, while Syal’s traveled the route from India. Both are prolific producers of culture. Between them they create: plays, novels, essays, ethnographic travel writing, film, radio and television scripts; they act in films, on television, and on the radio. Both have won many prestigious awards; ironically, Syal received the award of Member of the British Empire from the Queen in 1997 for her service to British culture. Where Phillips is a serious ironist, an academic, a Black Atlantic writer with an urge to revisit western history from the perspective of the fact and legacy of African slavery, Syal is a moving fiction writer and a very prominent TV and radio comic who parodies both the British and Indians in her humor. Together they speak to the vitality of contemporary postcolonial British artists who have flourished over the last twenty years. We will read, view and listen to their works within the theoretical framework of contemporary multiethnic British culture. Our discussions, but not our readings, will include names and works of their equally extraordinary contemporaries.
Thursday 12:50-3:50 p.m. Life Science L -3
HIS 515
“Race,
Citizenship, and Global Culture”
Shirley Jennifer Lim
This theme seminar will explore the historical constructions of race, gender, and culture. Topics will include race and gender within the United States, imperialism and colonialism, gender and performance, and global civil rights. Though this seminar takes the United States as its starting point, it follows racialized global culture into Europe, Africa, and Asia. We will use texts written by historians of race, gender, and culture as well as texts by anthropologists and literary critics.
Students will be expected to read the equivalent of one scholarly monograph a week; to lead discussion at least once during the semester; to attend Humanities Institute talks and/or other academic presentations; to produce a 15-20 page essay; and to present portions of that essay in a conference setting. In addition, students will suggest readings for common perusal.
Tuesday 5:20-8:10 p.m. SBS N 303
PHI 616/WST 600
“Feminist Critiques
of Technoscience”
Don Ihde
This term the technoscience research seminar will examine feminist critics and theoreticians who address science and technology. Primary figures will include: Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Evelyn Fox-Keller among others. The 'science wars' have often included protests and defenses against feminist critics, but in several cases these critics are themselves from science disciplines. In addition, we will examine several concrete examples of differences which have followed women's participation in research programs within particular sciences. The seminar will continue its format of reading living authors, with participants doing short presentations followed by critical discussions. Each participant should have a working research project which will also be discussed in the seminar.
Monday 12:50-3:40 p.m. Harriman Hall 249