Critical evaluation of hidden epistemologies embedded within cultural constructions of mind and body, health and illness. Examination of cultural, social, and political-economic influences on health and exploration of the concept of embodiment. Comparative investigation of how humans cope with pain, illness, and suffering.
Comp Lit - 488-0-20 From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Foucault, Agamben, Mbeme
In this course, we will take a comparative approach to reading the fundamental texts that in recent decades have shifted entirely the site of the political: Foucault’s essays on biopolitics, Agamben’s Homo Sacer, and Mbembe’s Necropolitics. If for Foucault the possibility of an affirmative biopolitics still exists, such a prospect is no longer true for Agamben and Mbembe. To understand the implications of this shift, we will focus first on Agamben’s Homo Sacer and its reinterpretation of biopolitics as thanatopolitics, paying attention to the text’s epistemic and geopolitical limits and its ongoing relevance for refugee studies. We will then explore Mbembe’s post-colonial redefinition of biopolitics as necropolitics, or the racist subjugation of life to the power of death of unwanted population. What is the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics? Is racism an effect of biopolitics or its premise? In order to confront these questions, we will reflect on a specific constellation of notions in our contemporary philosophical lexicon that have originated in these and other key texts: state of exception, the ban, homo sacer, bare life, the living dead, death worlds, enmity, abandonment, wars, borders, and brutalism. In addition, we will assess the meaning of the different paradigmatic sites of the modern politicization of life: the camp for Agamben and the plantation, the colonies, and the occupied territories for Mbembe. In the last phase of the course, we will read recent essays by Mbembe in which he tries to conceive forms of resistance to necropolitics. We will pay special attention to Mbembe’s concepts of restitution, reparation, and care. Seminar participants are strongly encouraged to find a way to use Foucault, Agamben, and/or Mbembe’s work in their own research projects. Readings will include works by Foucault, Agamben, Schmitt, Mbembe, Fanon, Azoulay, Táíwò, and Weheliye.
English 471-020 Studies in American Lit: Indigenous Archives and Public Humanities
This interdisciplinary, co-taught course introduces students to the texts, theories, and methods of Indigenous archives, while considering and practicing what it means to do interdisciplinary, publicly- and community-engaged humanities scholarship. We begin with these questions: how do writers, communities, scholars, and others use Indigenous archival materials? What are the genres, practices, and ethics necessary to work in and create scholarship from archives that contain Indigenous materials?
This course explores diverse approaches to writing history under the rubric of "the material turn." How are our interpretations of the past be transformed by placing material objects at the center of our accounts? Do artifacts have politics? To answer these questions, we will juxtapose several theories of material culture with historical case studies. Our examples will be world-wide, ranging from the Trobriand Islands and early modern Europe to modern America, Asia, and Africa, right up to present-day debates over AI. We will consider the many people involved in the design, production, and use of objects: artisans, engineers, capitalists, laborers, enslaved peoples, children, Luddites, Futurists, and consumers of all stripes, as well as coders, hackers and hobbyists. We will consider the life cycle of banal objects, as well as liminal objects which mediate diverse realms of experience. These perspectives will be examined in light of contending theories of material change: commodity fetishism, the social construction of technology, the anthropology of the gift, gender analysis, evolutionary theory, systems theory, infrastructure studies, and performance studies. The goal of the course is to show how accounts organized around inanimate artifacts can illuminate human histories. A unique feature of this course is that its assignments are themselves "object lessons," in which students practice various short-form academic genres: a peer review, a book blurb, a speaker introduction, a lay-press book review, an undergraduate lecture outline, a one-book one-TGS proposal, etc. For their final assignment, students write a short review essay organized around a material artifact of their choice.
What can historians (and other humanists) do with water? This course surveys the rich and varied literature on water history, a growing subfield that spans all time periods and all corners of the globe. A focus on water opens up critical new perspectives on knowledge, power, energy, technology, mobility, and borders, to name a few. How do rivers, oceans, lakes, and wetlands create and divide communities, fostering sovereignty, dispossession, travel, or migration? How do the use and abuse of water resources correlate to struggles over land use, to concepts of scarcity and abundance, to the sacrality and desecration of landscapes? What can water history teach us about climate change and environmental justice in the 21st century? To answer these and other questions, we will read and discuss key works in water history from Latin America, Europe, Africa, North America, Asia, and Pacifica. Readings may include: Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast (2019); Lucas Bessire, Running Out (2021); David Aiona Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It (2016); Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom (2018); Keith Dawson, Undercurrents of Power (2018); Sugata Ray, Water Histories of South Asia (2020); Vera Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land (2014); Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering (2009); Ling Zhang, The River, the Plain, and the State (2016); Philipp Lehmann, Desert Edens (2022); Richard White, The Organic Machine (1995). This course is open to graduate students in all fields of History and from all disciplipinary backgrounds, including the natural and social sciences, who have an interest in water.
