CMLT

Interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst existential, territorial, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, Arabfuturism-like its sister project of Afrofuturism/s-speaks to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. It is a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and biopolitics that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counter-futures disrupt the logics of the past, present, and assumed future to envision entirely new archeologies of futurity. Beyond the toll of US-backed "forever wars," recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Arab Spring. This seminar explores representations of apocalypse, dystopia, science fiction, speculative history, (non)futurity, and fantasy across works of literature, film, and art from the Middle East and North Africa. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame imagination and futurity in relation to the extractive economies of war, colonialism, and capital. Foregrounding the political and ethical stakes of futurity as an existential, epistemic, and aesthetic project, we consider how speculative acts of world-building can not only chart possible paths forward but also reveal the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination.

This course examines ways in which various works of Shakespeare have been appropriated and adapted in colonial/postcolonial contexts, with a special focus on Arabic and Palestinian literary and cultural productions. Students will be encouraged to examine the appropriation and adaptation of the works of Shakespeare through a close reading of the selected texts or excerpts. Students will have the opportunity to engage with important concepts such as intertextuality and influence while commenting on the author's admiration of Shakespeare's work or his or her challenge to him. All readings will be in English, although there might be an opportunity to discuss some of the texts in the original language (Arabic).

What constitutes the materiality of film? How do we understand the "material world" in relation to cinema, and how does the film camera mediate it? What does the process of mediation look like when the goal of cinema is not solely to represent but also change the world? This course will pair theoretical readings on new materialist approaches to cinema with select case studies drawn from Chinese and Soviet revolutionary cinema. Our primary aim is twofold: to introduce students to the "material turn" in cinema and media studies, and to reflect on what the specific fields of Soviet and Chinese Film Studies bring to the discussion. We will look closely at works by socialist filmmakers in the twentieth century who argued that cinema had a special role to play in mediating and transforming the material world. How does socialist cinema seek to orient its viewer to a particular relationship to objects? How does it treat the human relationship to the environment? How does it regard the material of film and the process of filmmaking itself? Ultimately, the course will familiarize students with diverse understandings of materiality and materialism and with key figures and works in global socialist cinema. Readings and screenings will range from the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s to Chinese revolutionary cinema of the early 1970s, and conclude with recent documentary and video experiments that engage with their legacies.

Can you have sex with God? And, if so, what then does sex mean? What, as a matter of fact, might spiritual sex mean for the cultivation of virtues like celibacy or virginity? While early Christianity and the Christian Middle Ages are often characterized by a disciplined asceticism, erotic desire was just as central to cultivating mystical love for God. In fact, the significance of the language of love, passion, loss, nuptial bliss, jubilation, and the body has rendered the Christian mystical tradition a useful resource for contemporary-and especially psychoanalytic-theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. This course will look both to the past and the present in order to explore the workings of pre- and postmodern desire and to draw connections between Christian mysticism and theories and practices of sex. Working across historical periods, we will read exemplary pieces of Christian mystical literature, psychoanalytic theory, and contemporary literature that draws from the medieval past.

The concept of “modernism” embraces a number of artistic trends and movements that arose in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe (and beyond) and continued well into the twentieth century. The task of the seminar is to exfoliate core features of that concept by examining works of literature and visual art that are understood as “modernist” as well as works of criticism and philosophical contributions devoted to understanding what modernism is. As the seminar title indicates, the work of Rainer Maria Rilke will be an important point of reference. We will study his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as well as selected poems and essays. Since Paris is the locus of (much of) Rilke’s novel, we will look back to Baudelaire, especially his essay The Painter of Modern Life, while considering his much-discussed poem À une passante (To a passerby) along with relevant commentaries. Moreover, the fact that Rilke worked on the novel during a period when he was also deeply engaged with Cezanne’s painting affords an opportunity to consider certain paintings by Cézanne. Here we will be guided by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay Cezanne’s Doubt, Robert Pippin’s study After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (2014), and T.J. Clark’s recent book If these Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022). The course is conceived as a participatory (discussion-intensive) seminar, conducted at a graduate level. English translations will be provided for works in French and German, but seminar discussions will be dotted by references to the original works. Participation by interested undergraduates who have done advanced work in the arts and/or philosophy is possible but requires permission from the instructor.

Friedrich Nietzsche was as much a critic (of literature, art, music, culture) as he was a philosopher, and the purpose of this seminar is to bring out the conception of criticism that unfolds across his work. Doing so will require some comparisons: with the Enlightenment (Lessing) and Romantic (esp. the Schlegel brothers) conceptions of criticism, but also with notions of criticism advanced, for example, by the New Critics, by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, and in contemporary work on aesthetics. Our main focus, however, will be on pertinent writings by Nietzsche, including the early essay on “Truth and Lie in a Non-Moral Sense,” Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations, relevant aphorisms from Human, All Too Human, Dawn, Joyful Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and Twilight of the Idols, concluding with Case of Wagner. The topic of criticism in Nietzsche is not separable, of course, from the core themes of Nietzsche’s work and the seminar may therefore be considered as one avenue of approach to Nietzsche’s overall achievement. Major positions in the boundless secondary literature on Nietzsche will be considered. This course is open to graduate students. Advanced undergraduate students with a special interest in the topic may be admitted only after consultation with the instructor.

This course navigates the global refugee, exilic, expatriate and émigré crises and experiences as modes of displacement that permeate modern and contemporary literature. Using a comparative approach, this course offers a sustained and nuanced examination of the notion of displacement in most of its forms as represented by many canonical literary works produced by writers of various nations. This course compares the historical, socio-political, economic, cultural and national motives behind the experiences of displacement discussed throughout the course. The main topics covered in this course are: Loss, Alienation and Disorientation, Displacement and Gender Crossing, Displacement and Imperialistic Gestures, Displacement and Mobility, Displacement and Self-fashioning, Acts of Departure: Roots and Routes, Home-Abroad Dichotomy, Displacement, Memory and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination, Displacement and Individual/ National Identity, Abjection and Assimilation, Cross-Cultural Psychology and Dialogical Acculturation, The Crisis of Acceptance and Belonging, Biopolitics and Zoopolitics, The American Dream and Otherness.

Did Asian American literature exist before Asian America? How do we access the enslaved and indentured lives that archives have little to tell us about? Can we reimagine the unheard lives of Asian diasporas historically perceived as “diseased,” inscrutable, and undesirable? What kind of interracial violence and intimacies did they form with Afro-diasporic and indigenous peoples under Spanish and British colonial occupations? To answer these questions, this course turns to the pre-twentieth-century history of Asian diasporas in the Americas, principally in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru. We will closely examine archival sources (inventory records, legal documents, lyrics, spiritual biography, etc.) on two historical trends of forced migration—the early modern transpacific trade of chino slaves and the nineteenth century coolie trafficking of Chinese and Indian laborers—and reflect on the constitutive limits of the archives. In addition, we will read anti-racist, feminist, and queer reimaginations of the Asian-diasporic past by contemporary authors and artists such as David Dabydeen, Michelle Mohabeer and Patricia Powell, etc. These primary sources will be supplemented by theoretical readings on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and Afro-Asian solidarity.

This course analyzes a range of Palestinian life narratives produced by authors based in different places, both in Palestine and the diaspora, united in a common cause and a desire to speak out, thereby circulating their works as a form of Palestinian testimony. This course sees these writers conversing with each other, each attempting to represent their own personal experience but also responding to the broader context of ongoing Palestinian dispossession, making this integral to the snapshot of experience they want to narrate. This course shows that such texts, individually meaningful but also conversant with wider concerns and messages of solidarity and advocacy, are ideal components of contemporary Palestinian literature that position itself as future-orientated, and expresses a desire to combat the international community’s failure to acknowledge Palestinian rights for justice and self-determination. This course contends that contemporary Palestinian life writing goes beyond narrating the specifics of the conflict in order to reflect on central questions of dignity, justice, and solidarity at the time Palestine is still a place that is not fully recognized. All readings will be in English, although there will be an opportunity to read and discuss texts in the original language (Arabic).

Ideas of justice are not self-evident truths but constructed through a variety of practices. This course will explore how the language of human rights, which scholars have called the moral lingua franca of our time, is constructed and circulated through aesthetic representation (such as literature, painting, and film), the law, HRNGOs, and public intellectual debates in the 20th and 21st centuries. Throughout the course, we will ask: How are ideas of human rights produced, transformed, or troubled by aesthetic production? What kinds of aesthetic and political claims can we stake in the name of human rights? And what might alternative visions of justice look like? We will discover how literature and visual art help both constitute and reflect the social and political truths by which we live, as well as how these seemingly obvious truths produce a variety of normative assumptions about what constitutes justice. Works will include texts by Ernst Bloch, Richard Wright, Kwame Nkrumah, Rigoberta Menchú, Leon Golub, Jacobo Timerman, and Ai Weiwei. Texts can be read in the English translation or original.