MACS 590 Transnational Politics of Race, Movements, and Media

Professor: Rachel Kuo

Meets: Tuesdays 3:30 - 6:20 pm (336 Gregory Hall)

This interdisciplinary course explores race, media, technology, and social movements from a range of critical, historical, and transnational perspectives. How are race and racialization mediated transnationally through conditions of empire and global capitalism? This seminar brings together histories and theories of racial power and violence alongside readings, case studies, and media materials from different social movements for transformation and liberation. The topics covered in this seminar include the politics of labor, settler colonialism, sanctuary, policing, militarism, and sexual and gender regulation as they connect to media, information, and technological systems. Readings may include works by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Stuart Hall, Lisa Lowe, Mahmood Mamdani, Cedric Robinson, and Sylvia Wynter.

 

GER 575 Revolutionary Archives: Post-1989 Literature, Film, and Theory

SPAN 535 / CWL 562 Revolutions & Social Movements seen through Latin American & Iberian Documentary Film

Professor: Eduardo Ledesma

Meets: Wednesdays 3:30-5:50 pm

This course explores Latin American and Spanish documentary film in relation to revolutionary and social movements from the 1930s until today. Documentary is seen as a genre that has an “immediate” relationship with reality and history. The course challenges such definitions of what constitutes a documentary and what measure of fiction the genre carries within itself, to show that documentary films do not simply represent reality, but also mediate and actively construct it. Special focus is placed on understanding the role of the Latin American and Spanish documentary as a tool for social transformation and political action. For instance we explore the notion espoused by Argentina’s Cine Liberación of the camera as a gun, or how movements such as “Indignados” in Spain used new cell phone documentaries to spark resistance to globalization. We will examine films from Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, and Cuba, among other countries. The course also serves as an introduction into film-specific analysis, focusing on the intricate connections between film form and content, aesthetics and politics. Additionally, we will parse important theoretical texts informed by Third Cinema and postcolonial theory, contemporary film theory and documentary theory.

 

ENGL 527 Between Women: Friendship, Separatism, and Feminism from Margaret Cavendish to Jane Austen

Professor: Hina Nazar

Meets: Mondays 12-2:50 pm (online)

In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), the early feminist philosopher Mary Astell argued that centuries of patriarchal oppression and inadequate education for women required a radical solution: separating women from a corrupt and corrupting social world and establishing separatist “Protestant nunneries” all over England. In such spaces, middle-and upper-class women would be able to free themselves from the “tyranny” of custom and the trivial pursuits prescribed for their sex, and learn to substitute Descartes and the Bible for the dubious pleasures of their looking-glasses and unreliable male flattery. Don’t look to men for your self-worth, Astell repeatedly urged her female readers. Look instead to yourselves and to admirable women friends, who will help you perfect both faith and judgment, and enable you to create a heaven on earth—a garden “where there are no serpents to deceive you.” Astell’s striking comments about women’s friendship find echoes and correspondences throughout the long eighteenth century: in the friendship poetry of Katherine Philips (“Orinda”), Anne Finch, and Mary Chudleigh; in novels envisioning utopian female communities such as Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall (1762) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman or Maria (1798); and in epistolary novels foregrounding relationships between women, including Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761), and Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné (1777). While scholars of the eighteenth century have long lamented the gender and other exclusions of Jürgen Habermas’s classic account of the bourgeois public sphere, our understanding of eighteenth-century publics and counter-publics remains incomplete owing to the neglect of female friendship as a topos of Enlightenment letters. This seminar explores various imaginings of women’s solidarity in eighteenth-century fiction, poetry, and educational and philosophical treatises, and situates them in the context of recent debates in feminist and public-sphere theory. Authors to be covered include Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Katherine Philips, Samuel Richardson (in selections), Sarah Scott, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austen

 

ENGL 564 Literary Modes and Genres

Professor: Robert Parker

Meets: Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:30-1:50 pm (English 125)

The Theory and Study of Poetry and Fiction. What does a poem, story, or novel do, and how? Most contemporary practices of criticism and interpretation apply across genres, but critics can also gain from studying how poems, stories, and novels work specifically as poetry or prose fiction. Early in the course, students will acquaint or reacquaint themselves with prosody and narratology. (Previous background in those areas is welcome but not required or presumed.) Readings will include a good deal of sometimes highly technical theory and criticism, addressing strategies and debates in the study of poetry as poetry and the study of narrative fiction as narrative fiction. We will draw on the histories and present practices of both genres rather than on any one time period. In that way the course aims to serve students interested in any and all periods of English-language literary study. Each student will write a series of exercises and design a writing project that connects the material of the course to the student’s interests, usually several short papers or one short and one longer paper about specific poetry, fiction, movements in poetry or fiction, or criticism or theory about poetry or fiction.

 

CWL 581 A Whaley Seminar

Professor: Brett Kaplan

Meets: Mondays 3-5 pm (Siebel Design Center SCD 0060)

This course explores literatures intersecting environmental and memory studies through a focus on whales and water. We’ll practice close reading and literary analyses as we work through a series of texts probably including Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned, Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale, Yuri Rythheu’s When the Whales Leave, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. We’ll also be looking at performances such as Sarah Cameron Sunde’s 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea and Mayfield Brooks’s Whalefall. We will not be reading all of Moby-Dick because we at Illinois are graced with a brilliant world expert on Melville who will be teaching a seminar on same. I encourage you to take Professor Jamie Jones’s course when it’s next offered. Very fortunate confluences for fall 2023 include Deke Weaver’s amazing Cetacean which will be performed in late September and a visit through the Humanities Research Institute of Alexis Pauline Gumbs on November 1. As we see waters rise, glaciers mourn, temperatures rise/fall/fluctuate, magnolias bloom in February, forests burn, and mud sliding down mountains and hills, we’ll need to think more about how we can listen to whales.

 

SOC 596/GWS 590 Gender, Race and Sexuality

Professor: Ghassan Moussawi

Meets: Tuesdays 3:30-6:20 pm

This graduate seminar explores contemporary sociological and interdisciplinary debates in studies of gender, race, and sexuality, with a particular focus on power. Even though we will go over multiple theories, we will pay particular attention to black feminist thought, intersectionality, transnational feminisms, critical race theory, and queer of color critique. We will consider various questions, including: What is the role of social and sociological theory in understanding gender, race, and sexuality? What diverse methodological approaches/considerations are employed in studies of gender, race, and sexualities? What are the various genealogies of these fields of study? We will read and discuss both theoretical and empirical studies on topics including: political economy of gender and sexuality, migration and transnational mobilities, affect, racial capitalism, racisms, urban inequalities and gentrification, nation and nationalism, masculinities and femininities, and social movements and organizing. We will also think about knowledge production processes, and consider the importance of theories of/from the global south. This course is open to students from all disciplines.

 

LA 587 The Senses

Professor: D. Fairchild Ruggles

Meets: Tuesdays and Thursdays 11:00-12:20 pm

An exploration into the senses as ephemeral and subjective bodily experiences, the sensory perception of the environment (in physiological and psychological terms), and how attention to the senses can more thoughtfully and actively guide landscape and architectural design. We will start with vision only long enough to launch into the more elusive sense of sound, smell, and touch. Classes take the form of lectures, seminar-style discussions, and laboratories.

 

ANTH 515 Politics, Knowledge, and Evidence

Professor: Virginia R. Dominguez

Meets: Tuesdays 5:30-8:20 pm (109 Davenport Hall)

This course explores the following topics: (1) political ideas and ideologies of evidence, (2) evidence and the politics of knowledge, (3) Claims as evidence and evidence as knowledge, (4) Knowledge and privilege, and (5) Jurisprudential debates.

 

LAW 656: International Human Rights Law

Professor: Francis A. Boyle

Meets: Mondays & Tuesdays 3-4:15 pm

Based primarily on a series of contemporary “real world” problems, the course introduces the student to the established and developing legal rules and procedures governing the protection of international human rights. Its thesis is that there exists a substantial body of substantive and procedural International Human Rights Law, and that lawyers, government officials, and concerned citizens should be familiar with the policies underlying this law and its enforcement, as well as with the potential it offers for improving the basic lot of human beings everywhere. Additionally, the course presupposes that the meaning of “human rights” is undergoing fundamental expansion, and therefore explores Marxist and Third World conceptions of human rights as well as those derived from the liberal West.