CMLT

The AIDS pandemic had a major impact on cultural production of the 1980s and the 1990s. But its effects did not end with the advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) in 1995. This course will examine the AIDS archive in its broadest sense—including art, literature, and theory produced in direct and indirect response to the pandemic from the 1980s to the present. What was the role of cultural production in political activism? What kinds of narratives did the allegorization of AIDS make possible and normalize? How has the AIDS pandemic been remembered and memorialized in more contemporary art and literature? Drawing from U.S., Latin American, and European texts, we will explore how AIDS has impacted sociopolitical issues related to sexuality, gender, class, and race.

This seminar will engage major texts by these three writers. Fanon was a strong  influence on Sartre and Beauvoir, and all three wrote about the oppressed and political power struggles In varying contexts. The issues we will be considering are decolonization, racism (including anti-Semitism), sexism/misogyny, and the Palestinian situation that ultimately created a rift between Fanon and Sartre, Questions will include Fanon’s support of violence, Sartre’s problematic positioning in the wake of Fanon’s ideas, and Beauvoir’s “feminist” stance in relation to issues of power.

This course introduces students to the field of Translation Studies and its key concepts, including fidelity, equivalence, and untranslatability, as well as the ethics and politics of translation. We will investigate the metaphors and models that have been used to think about translation and will consider translation as a transnational practice, exploring how “world histories” may be hidden within “word histories,” as Emily Apter puts it. In the process, we will assess theories of translation and poetry from classical antiquity to the present; compare multiple translations of the same text; and examine notable recent translations. Students will carry out translation exercises and create a final translation project of their own.

The role of space in everyday life has acquired a newfound prominence in light of recent events, as exemplified in the emergence of terms like “social distancing” and “quarantine” as common parlance. Approaching the implications of this from a different angle through an examination of how spatial imaginings travel across time and medium, we will explore questions of space as they are bound up with problems of gender, exile, aesthetics, and performance. How is space imagined and evoked across different media? How might attention to this question lead us to rethink the way that space mediates our experiences of our surroundings? While Japan will be our primary geographic topos, we will interrogate an understanding of these spatialities as ‘Japanese’ by surveying the role they come to play in discourses of both ‘Japanese-ness’ and Western modernism. We will pay special attention to performance (namely, nō dance-drama); however, we will also take up short stories, novels, film and more. Centering our investigations on modern and contemporary cultural production, our travels will also take us through premodern terrain to trace the multiple axes along which our diverse array of objects circulate. Figures considered include: Murata Sayaka, Gaston Bachelard, Hori Tatsuo, Doreen Massey, Mishima Yukio, Ōe Kenzaburō, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats. All readings will be in English.  

For decades, human rights activists and lawmakers in the United States have been fighting for a person’s right to speak their native language before the law, implying that language justice could be achieved through the use of interpreters. At the same time, a new generation of poets and fiction writers has been exercising alternative approaches to language justice, shifting the focus from speakers to listeners, and from the legal to the personal. This course brings these seemingly separate discourses into conversation in an attempt to trace the assumptions that undergird different formulations of language justice in the late 20th century and 21st century. Drawing on Edward Said’s The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals, we will examine NGO statements and immigration court hearings side by side with poetry and fiction by Monica de la Torre, Antonio Ruiz Camacho, Irena Klepfisz, Joseph Brodsky and others. As we analyze theories of identity, desire, language and responsibility and engage with thinkers such as Andrea Long Chu, Hannah Arendt and Aamir Mufti, we will consider the potential implications of bringing literature and law into conversation with one another.

To an observer steeped in the classical tradition, Modern Greece is a layer cake of survivals, revivals, and innovations. To Greeks today, antiquity is only one element of a vastly more complex cultural heritage. This course, originally designed for Study Abroad, will investigate contemporary Greece in multidisciplinary fashion, with readings from history (narratives as well as primary texts), art history, theology, philosophy, music, and poetry, as well as film. Topics to be covered range from the late-antique iconoclasm controversies to the contemporary financial crisis. We will compensate for the lack of field trips with virtual visits from professionals in Greece and elsewhere. Knowledge of Greek (classical or modern) is not required, though we will often be pausing to examine the effects of language hybridity and change.

This course will examine the themes of exile, migration and diaspora in a variety of literary texts from the late 20th and early 21st centuries in dialogue with recent cultural theoretical work. The texts to be studied will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and films from three sets of locations: authors of South Asian (Indian and Sri Lankan) origin in North America and Europe; writers of Turkish, Japanese and Indian origin in Germany; and Latin American-born writers writing from abroad, in addition to Johny Pitts' ethnographic book Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2020). Besides charting the theoretical coordinates of exile, migration and diaspora studies, we will explore questions such as: How has the accelerated movement of people, ideas, goods, and cultural practices affected literary authors of different racial, class, gender, religious, and national origins? What is the meaning of belonging, home and homeland? How do authors relate to concepts of the nation, national identity, and nationalism? What happens to the physical body, affect, love and intimacy, the family, and intergenerational relations in migration? What are the narrative and lyric patterns and tropes of writing between worlds? Is there a "poetics of dislocation"? How do writers handle issues of language, the mother tongue and bi- or multilingualism? All texts will be read in English translation, but we will also make translation a central issue of discussion by examining original texts whenever possible. 

This course will examine the themes of exile, migration and diaspora in a variety of literary texts from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in dialog with recent cultural theoretical work. The texts to be studied will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and films from three sets of locations: authors of South Asian (Indian and Sri Lankan) origin in North America and Europe; writers of Turkish, Japanese and Indian origin in Germany; and Latin American-born writers writing from abroad, in addition to Johny Pitts’ ethnographic book Afropean. Notes from Black Europe(2020). Besides charting the theoretical coordinates of exile, migration and diaspora studies, we will explore questions such as: How has the accelerated movement of people, ideas, goods, and cultural practices affected literary authors of different racial, class, gender, religious, and national origins? What is the meaning of belonging, home and homeland? How do authors relate to concepts of the nation, national identity, and nationalism? What happens to the physical body, affect, love and intimacy, the family, and intergenerational relations in migration? What are the narrative and lyric patterns and tropes of writing between worlds? Is there a “poetics of dislocation”? How do writers handle issues of language, the mother tongue and bi- or multilingualism? All texts will be read in English translation, but we will also make translation a central issue of discussion by examining original texts whenever possible.

While this course is conceptualized as a sequel to Queer Asia(s) 1 from last fall, it is nevertheless a standalone course that can be taken separately, without prerequisites. This course continues to explore representations of queerness, same-sex love and sexualities and debates around them by introducing students to a variety of literature and films in both Asian languages and English. The geographic regions represented include India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea and Singapore. There will be a focus on the modern/contemporary period as well as queer diasporas. We will also read scholarship that will help us place the production and reception of these primary sources in historical, political, cultural and religious contexts. Questions of cross-cultural and transnational dialogue and cultural specificity will be addressed. Students need to be available for 2 synchronous online meetings per week.

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.