ANTH589-Readings in Anthropology; Critical Museum Issues (Helaine Silverman et al)
Wednesdays 5-8 pm
Critical Museum Issues is being taught by faculty from various departments and units on campus. It offers students a wide exposure to cutting-edge investigations and explorations in the interdisciplinary field of museum studies. Each week a different scholar will present his/her museum research and activities. Students will read e-reserve packets of articles/chapters prepared by each faculty member and come to class prepared for discussion. No term paper or exams are required. This course is being offered under the ANTH 589 rubric. Students who wish to register may do so by using Professor Helaine Silverman' s personal call number which is 12388, as if taking an independent study (she is the course >facilitator). Enrollment is limited to 30 students.
Course topics include:
- History of Museums
- Trends, Views and Theories of Collecting Practices
- African Art in Museums
- The Display of Islamic Art and Culture
- The Museum in Revolutionary France
- The Politics of Museums in Post-Franco Spain
- Colonial and Postcolonial Representations in Latin American Museums
- Latino/a Exhibitions and Education at the Smithsonian: Real and Virtual Venues
- Arts Administration in Elite and Community Venues
- Memory and Jewish Museums
- Race and History in American and South African Museums
- Native American Indians and Museums
- Contemporary Art Museums
- Beyond the Museum's Walls
- Information Systems and Databases
- Mounting an Exhibition
special gallery lectures by artist Walid Raad in conjunction with the opening of "Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography"and David Prochaska (History) on the opening of "Colonial/Non-Western Photography" Participating Faculty include: Jennifer Armstrong (Community Arts >Organization, C-U), Matti Bunzl (Anthropology), Michael W. Conner (Krannert Art Museum), Susan Davis (Institute of Communications Research), Brenda Farnell (Anthropology), Christopher Fennell (Anthropology), Rebecca Ginsburg (Landscape Architecture), Kathleen Harleman (KAM), Jordana Mendelson (Art History), David O'Brien (Art History), David Prochaska (History), Boyd Rayward (GSLIS), D. F. Ruggles (Landscape Architecture), Helaine Silverman (Anthropology), Arlene Torres (Anthropology), Oscar Vázquez (Art History)
ART541-Designing the Avant-Garde: From the Kiosk to the Dressing Table (Jordana Mendelson)
Recent scholarship on the visual arts of modernity has turned toward the interdisciplinary terrain of design to chart the avant-garde's relationship to the everyday. Rather than see the avant-garde artist as isolated from the popular culture of modernity, which often includes ephemeral artifacts, art historians are recognizing (as design historians have known for years) that some of the most challenging and innovative work done by modern artists was aimed for public distribution, sometimes for the masses and other times for the cultural elite. This seminar will consider the ways in which European avant-garde artists were involved in designing modernity from approximately 1880-1930. We will look at modern artists' projects for magazines, advertisements, exhibition displays, furniture, and fashion. We will look at theories of the avant-garde and modernism (from the historical period and the present) as well as studying the artists' texts and designs. We will focus primarily on the European avant-gardes, however students may work on individual research topics of their choice, in consultation with the professor.
Questions: jmendels@uiuc.edu
Some of the books we'll be reading :
| Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age | Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity |
| Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930 | Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay, eds., A Book of the Book |
| Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists' Books |
ART546-Contexts of the Postcolonial (David O'Brien and Okwui Enwezor)
Meets every other week, Tuesdays and Wednesdays 7-9 pm
Over the course of the last two decades, postcolonialism as emerged as one of the central interpretive paradigms in the humanities. This seminar examines the work of a number of important postcolonial thinkers. Rather, however, than offering a survey of a single “postcolonial theory,” we will emphasize the range and complexity of these thinkers by examining the ways in which their thought arose from a variety of postcolonial contexts. We shall also explore the relationship of postcolonial thought to older, primarily European theories of the modern and postmodern, asking how these theories are challenged or reinforced by the insights of postcolonial thinkers. Among the authors we shall read are Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, C.L.R. James, Roberto Schwarz, Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, K. Anthony Appiah, J. M. Coetzee, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Ella Shohat, Trinh Minh-ha, and Frederic Jameson.
CWL55: Postcolonial Theory(Wail S. Hassan)
Mondays 3-4:50 pm
This seminar offers an extensive introduction to the field of postcolonial studies: its development, theoretical frameworks, major debates, and recent trends. We will begin with the early theorists of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, then go on to investigate the political and institutional context within which the field emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s as a subset of literary studies. We will consequently explore the various directions of research in the field, with special attention to the intellectual genesis of postcolonial theory in the context of Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and poststructuralism.
Readings:
| Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism | Amin, Eurocentrism |
| Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth | Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World |
| Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction | Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire |
| Said, Orientalism | Nair, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference |
Coursepacket with readings from Ahmad, Ashcroft, Bhabha, Gikandi, Jameson, JanMohamed, Kachru, Macaulay, Mohanty, Moore-Gilbert, Ngugi, Parry, Spivak, Viswanathan, and others.
CWL551: Postcolonial Theory (Wail S. Hassan)
Mondays 3-4:50 pm
This seminar offers an extensive introduction to the field of postcolonial studies: its development, theoretical frameworks, major debates, and recent trends. We will begin with the early theorists of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, then go on to investigate the political and institutional context within which the field emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s as a subset of literary studies. We will consequently explore the various directions of research in the field, with special attention to the intellectual genesis of postcolonial theory in the context of Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and poststructuralism.
Readings:
| Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism | Amin, Eurocentrism |
| Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth | Majid, Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World |
| Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction | Roy, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire |
| Said, Orientalism | Nair, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch: The Idea of Indifference |
Coursepacket with readings from Ahmad, Ashcroft, Bhabha, Gikandi, Jameson, JanMohamed, Kachru, Macaulay, Mohanty, Moore-Gilbert, Ngugi, Parry, Spivak, Viswanathan, and others.
COMM391/575: Cultural Studies and Critical Interpretation (Cameron McCarthy)
Mondays and Wednesdays 11-1 pm
This course will offer students the opportunity to become familiar with the history, applications and limitations of several theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary culture and popular media that have been developed in the emergent research field known as cultural studies. It is intended to provide students with analytical frameworks for understanding contemporary cultural life. Debates and issues within cultural studies and debates between cultural studies and other schools of thought will serve as the organizing agenda for exploring: the relationships between culture, experience and unequal social relations of gender, race, class, nation, and sexuality; youth cultures, resistance through rituals; popular culture, power and public policy; cultural imperialism and center-periphery relations; poststructuralism and its implications for the study of culture; and the impact of cultural studies across the disciplines. This course is interdisciplinary and should be of interest to students with backgrounds in several different areas, including: a) research methods that combine textual analysis of contemporary popular media and culture with sociological analysis; b) theoretical encounters and bridges between continental thought and American traditions; c) feminist theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, cultural geography, psychoanalysis, queer theory, Marxist political economy analysis, postcolonialism and critical race theory; and d) the application of literary and rhetorical theories to the media and popular culture. The pro-seminar will meet twice per week (for approximately 2 hours per session).
Readings:
| Williams, R. (1992) Television: Technology and Cultural Form | *Levine, L. (1988). Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America |
| *Hebdige, D. (1988). Subculture: The Meaning of Style | Clifford, J. (1988). The Predicament of Culture |
| Dworkin, D. (1997). Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain | Carey, J. (1992). Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society |
| *Czitrom, D. (1982) Media and the American Mind | Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production |
| *Storey, J. (Ed.) (1998). Cultural Theory and Popular culture: A Reader | *Klein, N. (2001). No Logo |
| Rosaldo, R. (1993) Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis | *Jencks, C. (1986). What is post-modernism? |
| McChesney, R. (2004). The Problem of the Media: US Communications Politics in the 21 st Century | *James, C.L.R. (1963). Beyond A Boundary |
Note for 391 Students
*Books and articles identified by a single asterisk are the readings that students registered in 391 are expected to read and study. Students enrolled in 391 are expected to purchase only the books identified by the single asterisk along with the course reader which will be available at Notes and Quotes. All course readings in the reader will also be available on-line. Students registered in 391 will meet separately with the instructor for an hour-long tutorial session on Fridays at 2pm in room 336 Greg Hall.
EALC550-Gender and Globalization in East Asia (Karen Kelsky)
Thursdays 10:30 am - 12:20 pm
This graduate seminar addresses the gender politics of globalization in East Asia, focusing on recent transformations in normative gender identities, family structures, workplace practices, media productions and representations, feminist and queer activism, and queer communities in China, Japan, and Korea. It explores transformations in national identity and nationalism under conditions of transnational capitalism and neoliberalism, and the emergence of alternative gender identities within the context of national and transnational negotiations of tradition, modernity and cultural identity.
ENGL527-Gender, Sexuality, and the Novel (Robert Markley)
Tuesdays 3 - 4:50 pm
This seminar will concentrate on some major eighteenth- century novels that have been particularly influential in the subsequent development of the genre. We will pay particular attention to key critical and theoretical issues that have emerged in feminist and materialist criticism since the 1980s: the problem of male writers, notably Defoe and Richardson, writing from the point of women; the novel's resistance to and complicity with eighteenth-century ideologies of gender; the ideological construction of the female body; and the relationship between “subliterary” genres—pornography and romance—and the so-called “great tradition” of the novel. Critics we will read include Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Nancy Armstrong, Lennard Davis, Terry Castle, Paula Backscheider, and Ros Ballaster. Because this seminar is intended to be valuable to students with a wide range of interests in gender issues, women's writing, and the history and theory of the novel, no specialized knowledge of eighteenth-century literature is required, but students are encouraged to begin reading the longer texts, particularly, Clarissa, before the beginning of the semester.
Novels will include: Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, Frances Burney, Cecilia, Daniel Defoe, Roxana, Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, and Eliza Haywood, short novels (The Injur'd Husband, Fantomina, and Lasselia)
Students will be responsible for a short paper on secondary criticism, a class presentation, and a long seminar paper (20-25 pp.)
ENGL581T-Queer Theory (Siobhan Somerville)
Tuesdays 3 - 4:50 pm
This course begins from the premise that queer theory is distinct from identity-based formations such as lesbian and gay studies. Instead of anchoring its methods to the question of sexual orientation, queer theory aims to destabilize the ground upon which any particular claim to identity can be made. The full potential of queer theory is thus to dislodge "the status of sexual orientation itself as the authentic and centrally governing category of queer practice, thus freeing up queer theory as a way of reconceiving not just the sexual, but the social in general" (Harper, et al., 1997).
While one familiar genealogy of queer studies locates its origins in the development of a theory of sexuality (as distinct from theories of gender), in fact some of the most ambitious work in the field has critiqued any attempt to give priority to sexuality over other categories of analysis. We will examine the development of the field of queer theory over the past two decades, with particular attention to areas such as "queer of color critique," black queer studies, and transnational queer studies. Readings may include works by Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Ann Cvetkovich, Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, David Eng, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Rod Ferguson, Gayatri Gopinath, Dwight McBride, José Muñoz, Adrienne Rich, Juana Maria Rodriguez, Marlon Ross, Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner, among others.
HIST591-Theorizing History, Historicizing Theory (David Prochaska)
Tuesdays 1 - 2:50 pm
Any good work of history arguably raises the question of what history is all about--what it is that historians do when they “do” history. We can agree that after reading and researching, historians present their results in a narrative format, they construct a narrative. But where do these narrative constructs come from? In this course we will plot a cognitive map of history and interpretive communities; together we will construct a genealogy of historical studies by successively inquiring into the intellectual and political fields in which historians work. Topics include Marxism in theory and practice, Weber in theory and practice, the now old ‘new' social history and the French Annales school, Geertz and interpretive anthropology, the now middle-aged ‘new' cultural history and cultural studies, Foucault and poststructuralism, women and gender, history after the ‘linguistic turn,' postcolonial studies and the Subaltern Studies school, and history and postmodernism.
PHIL444-Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (Bill Schroeder)
Tuesdays and Thursdays 11:30 - 12:50 pm
This class will be a detailed study of Sartre's second great philosophical treatise, The Critique of Dialectical Reason (Vol. 1), as well as its prologue, Search for a Method. The book is very difficult; so there will be a lot of lecturing. I will try to make some time for class discussion, however. Major topics covered in the book are: the nature of dialectical thinking, the relation between human action and the environment, tools, recognition, the zero degree of social life—which Sartre calls “seriality”; the four basic types of groups (fusing groups; pledged groups, organizations; institutions) and their differences from one another; and history. Sartre takes on both Marx and Hegel in this book, and he makes major contributions to philosophical sociology and the theory of history. Requirements will include a term paper, a midterm, and a final exam.
Students should have taken one course in Continental philosophy in order to prepare for this course (225; 311/411; 341/441; 343/443; 312/412 on Nietzsche; 314/414 on Sartre or Merleau-Ponty; 401/501 on Sartre)
PHIL501-Nietzsche and his Interpretation (Richard Schacht)
Tuesdays 3 - 5 pm
Nietzsche's philosophical thinking is widely recognized to be profoundly important; but its interpretation and assessment are matters of considerably disagreement. We shall look first (during the first six weeks or so) at selections from his most significant philosophical writings (both pre- and post-Zarathustra), in conjuction with some related essays of mine. Then, during the remainder of the semester, we will look at a number of notable interpretations of his thinking by others: tentatively, Heidegger, Jaspers, Kaufmann, Danto, Nehamas, Clark, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida. Throughout, we shall be particularly interested in the questions of how to understand, and what to make of, Nietzsche's (developing) thinking with respect to (the reality and possibility of) truth and knowledge, values and morals, and human being -- and also how to understand, and what to make of, these various interpretations.
There will be no book order for the seminar. Participants will be expected to have (or acquire) either the Kaufmann or the Hollingdale translations of most of Nietzsche's writings (BT, HH, GS, BGE, GM, TI, and also WP). They also will be expected to have or acquire or have access to my Making Sense Of Nietzsche and my Nietzsche, and to have familiarized themselves with them BEFORE the beginning of the semester. Information about acquiring or accessing the various interpretive studies of Nietzsche we will be considering will be made available in due course. Some material for the seminar (including the essays of mine not in my two books) will be made available in a course pack.
RLST494- Topics in Religious Thought Muslim Society and Ethics: Rethinking Tradition in the Global Age ( Valerie Hoffman )
Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30 - 10:50 am
Are Muslims necessarily tied to a tradition that alienates them from today's global society? How are Muslims incorporating, changing, and analyzing their tradition and their place in the contemporary world? This course explores Muslim ideas on a broad range of ethical issues that face societies today, such as human rights, democracy, gender equality, just war, and bioethics, and analyzes the relevance of Muslim intellectualism to Muslim social reality.
SOC465-Globalization Dynamics and Debates ( Jan Nederveen Pieterse )
3 Undergraduate hours or 4 graduate hours
Examination of the background and ramifications of the new wars. Against the backdrop of contemporary globalization we turn to dynamics in the United States as a prelude to the "war on terrorism". In light of data and debates we consider continuities and discontinuities between neoliberal globalization and "war on terrorism", or "permanent war", with regard to government, geopolitics and military strategies, economic policies and trade, corporations, and culture, media and spin.
SOC596-Culture and Politics ( Jan Nederveen Pieterse )
Tuesdays 4:30 - 7:20 pm
This grad course deals with theorizing on ethnicity, race, multiculturalism, hybridity, aesthetics and politics, neoliberalism and culture, culture and development, religion and fundamentalism, Islam as foe, politics of representation, and globalization and culture.
SPCM496 - The Rhetorics of Punishment; or, Hangings, Whippings, Cartings, Torture, and Other Useful Tools of State (Stephen Hartnett)
Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30 - 10:50 am
My former student, Joseph Hart, a prisoner awaiting execution at San Quentin Prison, wrote the following lines to honor his friend, Manny Babbitt, who was executed on 4 May 1999:
| Tonight another tear falls |
| As you kill my friend. |
| What a heartless country, |
| What a horrible state, |
| To kill to show that killing |
| Is wrong. |
| I'm tired of losing my friends, |
| And wonder: |
| How many more will die? |
| How many more will die? |
Answering that question depends on the outcome of a number of pending court cases and the ever-changing winds of public sentiment, yet we know that as of October 2004, 3,487 men and women currently await execution in U.S. prisons. To help us understand why Hart may have to write so many more poems lamenting the execution of fellow prisoners, we will attempt in this bridge-level course to theorize the death penalty and other forms of corporeal punishment, to historicize their uses, and to politicize their current manifestations.
To theorize the function of the death penalty and corporeal punishments, we will rely on the classic arguments offered in Cesare Beccaria's 1764 On Crimes and Punishments , Jeremy Bentham's 1787 Panopticon; or, The Inspection House , Michel Foucault's 1975 Discipline and Punish , Michael Meranze's 1996 Laboratories of Virtue , and selected additional essays by Benjamin Rush, Thomas Jefferson, Garry Wills, and Peter Linebaugh.
To historicize these theories, we will read crime pamphlets, punishment broadsides, execution sermons, and activist protests from the late-18 th and early-19 th centuries; these primary documents will be contextualized by studying Louis Masur's 1989 Rites of Execution , Stuart Banner's 2002 The Death Penalty , and Karen Halttunen's 1998 Murder Most Foul .
To ask political questions about the current uses of capital and corporeal punishment, we will rely on readings from Hugo Bedau's 1997 The Death Penalty in America , Rachel King's 2003 Don't' Kill in Our Name , The Chicago Tribune's 1999 series entitled “The Failure of the Death Penalty in Illinois,” The Governor of Illinois's 2002 Report of the Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment , and other reports, court cases, and materials available from the web. To examine how U.S. punishment practices migrate abroad, we will conclude the class by studying the Fay and Schlesinger reports, the U.S. Army's stunning investigations of torture and murder in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.
In each of our three sub-sections, we will focus on the rhetorical construction of arguments both supporting and opposing punishments. Hence merging theory, history, politics, and rhetorical criticism, the course hopes to provide a broad overview of arguments about the uses of corporeal punishment in general and the death penalty in particular.
SPCM538- The Rhetorics, Politics, and Histories of Capitalism, from Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (2004) (Stephen Hartnett)
Tuesdays 2 - 5 pm
In September 2004 the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a non-profit watchdog group, reported that its study of Pentagon contracts worth over $900 billion had found a startling pattern: 60% of Boeing's $81 billion in Pentagon contracts over the past five years had been awarded without competitive bidding ; 74% of Lockheed Martin's $94 billion in contracts over that same period were awarded in the same no-bid process, as were 67% of Raytheon's $40 billion in contracts. The implication of the CPI's study was clear: even while working under the guise of expanding and protecting “free markets,” the military-industrial-complex was functioning as a favor-extending and riches-sharing form of corporate welfare. One Boeing executive has already been sentenced to jail for these illegal contracts; more indictments will follow, targeting both corporate suppliers and Pentagon procurement staff. Eighteenth century elites were free of such sticky legal and moral problems, for under late-mercantilism it was understood that states enriched friends who fought wars of empire, that wars of empire enriched states, and that both political and economic cronyism could be justified by levying a barrage of claims about advancing nationalism, defending racial purity, enabling the march of progress, and defending civilization. From this perspective, the U.S.'s bungled reconstruction of Iraq—including the illegalities noted above—appears less like a new phenomena than a repeat of older processes. Indeed, by studying the history of international capitalism, and especially the rhetorical means of justifying it , we may gather a sense of both the continuities linking and the ruptures within the histories of empire and capital.
Under the heading of Phase I: Launching Revolutions, Building Nations, Expropriating Profit , we will study the founding moments and documents of modern international capitalism, circa 1776-1800. For historical context we will study Linebaugh and Rediker's, Many-Headed Hydra , Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution , Conkin's, Prophets of Prosperity, McCoy's Elusive Republic, and Elkins and McKitrick's Age of Federalism . To study the rhetoric of the period's key players, we will rely upon Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , Alexander Hamilton's Writings , Ben Franklin's Writings , and selections from Commager's The Spirit of '76 and Bailyn's Pamphlets of the American Revolution . We'll pay particular attention here to the ways revolutionary Americans interweave notions of nationalism, democracy, justice, and economics.
Under the heading of Phase II: Bureaucratizing Revolutions, Re-Building Nations, Organizing Profit , we will examine the architecture of the post-World War II economic order. For historical context we will rely upon Jezer's The Dark Ages, Life in the U.S., 1945-1960 , Blum's Roosevelt and Mogenthau , and Block's, The Origins of International Economic Disorder . Along with studying the period's newspapers and Congressional Record , we will gather a sense of the dominant rhetorical tropes of this phase by analyzing the 1944 Bretton Woods Treaty, J. M. Keynes's Essays in Persuasion , and Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom . The key idea here is to watch as a post-war and now globally triumphant U.S. attempts to rationalize international economics while maintaining political dominance.
Under the heading of Phase III: Banking on Counter-Revolutions, Destroying Nations, Producing Paper Profit , we will address the post-9/11 status of the “Washington Consensus,” the development model currently being employed by the world's economic elite. For context, we will rely upon Gills's Globalization and The Politics of Resistance , Eckes's Globalization and The American Century , and Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity . For our primary documents we will consult President Bush's post-9/11 speeches on the economy, globalization, and international aid; U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick's speeches on NAFTA and the FTAA; annual reports from the World Bank and IMF; recent UN World Development Reports ; and USAID materials regarding the reconstruction of Iraq.
PLEASE NOTE THAT NO PRIOR ECONOMIC EXPERTISE IS REQUIRED TO TAKE THE COURSE.