Permaculture and Performance

This is a practical block seminar where we study the ethics and principles of permaculture (permanent / sustainable agriculture) through games and exercises from the Theatre of the Oppressed. Full participation at both weekends is vital.

Writing Environmental Racism

This is a weekly seminar where we study texts that investigate the connection between environmental degradation and racism and where we respond to the subject, through creative / critical writing. 

Environmental racism is, according to the environmental justice movement, the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people who are Black, Indigenous and People-of-Colour. Environmental Justice is the movement's response to environmental racism. This course seeks to contribute to the environmental justice movement.

Writing Home and Away: Places, Belonging(s), Affects

Acknowledging the importance of “home” in discussions on migration and displacement, this seminar focuses on the concept of home in several works of migrant literature. The seminar aims to explore the complexity of the concept of home beyond pure location: as a feeling, a thought, an ideal, a process, a ritual. The seminar will thus focus on reading and analyzing a variety of contemporary texts (poetry, novels, essays or autobiographies) by diverse writers to explore the ways in which they engage with the concept and the experience of home for mobile individuals.


Graphic Medicine

Colloquium

This research colloquium provides students in Anglophone Modernities with the opportunity to study and critically engage with various current approaches to literary and cultural studies. Advanced students can also present their own MA projects and receive feedback. In addition, we will make time to discuss the process of writing an MA thesis. Attention: the central approaches discussed in this particular colloquium are poststructuralism/deconstruction, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism.

Research Colloquium Kopie 1

Literature and Aging

Contemporary Indian fiction is full of older people. In more progressive circles, this literary phenomenon is viewed with some anxiety, as one sign of an intensifying cultural conservatism, allied to the ‘family values’ rhetoric of Hindu Nationalism in which social relations, including those between ruler and ruled, are best modeled along the paternalistic, multigenerational structure of the traditional family, which is moreover deeply invested in casting one’s elders, and the hoary past for which they are seen to stand, as subjects of unmitigated reverence. Indeed, the category of age has acquired such symbolic density over time (and not just in India), that it has become difficult to speak about what is old, elderly and ageing, without also at the same time drawing on the staple binaries of tradition and modernity, past and present, frailty and strength. That said, to view age always as a metaphor for something else – a critical phenomenon aided in no small measure by the preoccupations of postcolonial theory -- entails excluding other legitimate ways of reading its representation in fiction – readings which privilege corporeality and affect over abstraction. While this course on post-Independence Indian literature on ageing begins by recognizing the usefulness of age in thinking through culture and politics in the subcontinent, it then moves beyond the cultural semiotic approach, to examine a range of responses, from despair to defiance to delight with which older people negotiate changes in family form, social alienation, psychological vulnerability, perceived obsolescence, moral restrictions, diminishing cultural capital, dependence and loss of memory, and not least imminent death. Weekly classroom lectures and discussions will focus on close readings of a series of short stories, novels and film, in English and in English translation from various Indian languages, paying special attention to the role of body, memory, narrative, objects, care, and the changing dynamics of desire in the diaspora. Week 6 and Week 9 are reserved for solo or group presentations on a prescribed short story that invites critical engagement with significant themes.

Global Modernities: Thinking Through Family

This course seeks to comprehend the contours of an Indian modernity through its literary representations over the last century, as viewed from within the shifting framework of the family. Widely recognized as one of the most common ways of conceptualizing the nation, the family metaphor has been sharply critiqued in postcolonial scholarship, where the putative homogeneity of the family is seen to elide the diversity and multiplicity of the nation and normalize its hierarchies. This in turn has prompted calls for models of national belonging that are less invested in affect. What tends to go unnoticed in attempts to rescue the heterogeneity of the nation, however, is the constructedness of families. Postcolonial critiques of ‘the family metaphor’ gloss over the long history of alternative family forms which simultaneously interrogate the presumed stability, normalcy and naturalness of the traditional family as also foreground its many contradictions.

Weekly readings will examine a series of literary texts from the last hundred years of Indian Writing in English and in English translation from other Indian languages, focusing on models of family that resist nationalist appropriation via foregrounding relational patterns and diversities that fall outside of the familiar circuits of heterosexual desire but that nonetheless retain the affective charge characteristic of belongingness to the nation. The discussion of literary texts will alternate weekly with readings drawn from a range of disciplines including history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, literary theory, politics, sexuality studies, visual cultures, and more, aimed at unpacking a complex history of Indian modernity, paying special attention to questions of subjectivity, citizenship, secularism, mass media, consumption, agency and care. Weeks 8 and 13 are reserved for solo or group presentations on short prescribed texts that invite analysis of the course’s chief concerns.


Beyond Ethics: Critical Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism

A cosmopolitan perspective seeks to counter modern nationalism’s tendency to link cultures and identities to specific places by focusing on the world as a whole rather than on an enclave within it. It may be seen to possess, in other words, the potential for offering an ethics for globalization. Yet, precisely because so many of the crucial relationships that shape the forces of globalization are indirect, these are not easily reducible to interpersonal norms. The problem with cosmopolitanism, as Craig Calhoun argues, lies in its suggestion that it is an attitude that can be assumed without altering the political or economic structures which lie outside of the individual. What kind of purchase, then, do cosmopolitan theories have on the contemporary world?

This course seeks to introduce students to some of the major strands in the debate on cosmopolitanism, how these tend to draw upon a series of other closely related forces that are shaping the world: Where does cosmopolitan thinking stand in relation to the spectre of resurgent nationalism we are seeing unfold around us today? Does cosmopolitanism always work in conjunction with globalization? Can it offer us an ethic of living in a multicultural society? What understandings of cosmopolitanism might help us negotiate a postcolonial future? Drawing on a selection of readings from a range of disciplines including philosophy, anthropology, politics, history, sociology, and literature, the course seeks to promote a layered understanding of a conceptual perspective whose capacity for understanding, critiquing and negotiating the world in which we live today is beginning to be questioned.



Race, Class and Gender in US Ethnic Literature Kopie 1