Courses Taught by Fellows

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, 2007-09

Fatima El-Tayeb

ES 191 Migrants and Minorities in Contemporary Europe
Winter 2008
Interdepartmental Program in European Studies

This course will focus on contemporary continental Europe and the ways in which race, class, religion, gender, and sexuality intersect in debates on immigration and identity. The conflation of these concepts in the creation of “foreignness” is certainly not restricted to Europe, but it affects the continent in particular ways. In this class, we will approach these configurations through a focus on three groups: Muslim minorities, Eastern European Roma, and undocumented African migrants. While we will explore dominant discourses on migration across the continent, we will pay special attention to self-representations of these communities and cultural productions by “2nd generation” artists and activists and their strategies of undermining dominant perceptions of what it means to be European. Readings will also include theoretical texts by Etienne Balibar, David Theo Goldberg, Stuart Hall, Saskia Sassen, and others.

LGBTS 187. Selected Topics in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Queer of Color Critique: Queer Activism and Social Justice
Spring 2008
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program

Queer theory was born out of the interaction, and tension, between activism and theory, its groundbreaking deconstruction of naturalized understandings of (sexual) identity inspired as much by French poststructuralist and feminist theories as by black power, gay liberation, and women of color feminism. With the academic implementation of queer studies however, these activist roots have moved further and further to the background. In this class, we will retrace the links of queer theory to social justice movements and explore the consequences of the increased distance to these origins as well as attempts to reconnect to them. Subjects will include: queers of color and the gay mainstream, gender and postcolonial theory, feminism, gay marriage, and the war on terror. 

Kris Manjapra

History 191N/201K Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism
Winter 2008
History Department

What were the expressions of cosmopolitan thought and life in the age of colonialism?  How was cosmopolitanism lived differently, and to different ends, by groups in Europe and in the colonial world.  This course offers a comparative and connective study of the intellectual and cultural production, and the social networks, associated with the Pan-Africa, Greater India, Pan-Europe and Communist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the internationalist organizations that developed during those years.  We will encounter the often conflicting cosmopolitan visions among colonial intellectuals and European thinkers, and investigate what they tell us about nationalism and imperialism in the era before decolonization. Students will also critically engage with current-day theoretical work on cosmopolitanism, and will discuss how notions of cosmopolitanism have shifted in our own time.

History 191N South Asian Intellectual History in Comparative Perspective
Spring 2008
History Department

A survey of major themes in South Asian intellectual history from the Mughal Period to Independence using a variety of cultural and literary sources: visual, audio and written.  Emphasis will be placed on translocal networks of thought and political activity in which Indian thinkers were embedded, including connections with South East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the United States of America, Britain and Central Europe.

Sonali Pahwa

Anthropology 157/2 - 297/8
Language, Media and Community in the Arab World
Winter 2008

This seminar investigates the imagination of an “Arab world” by examining the historical role of the Arabic language in linking distant peoples, its dialogue with vernacular culture, and the ways in which mass media have created new transnational cultural forms in Arabic. Beginning with a look at traditional speech genres for poetry, religious discourse and performance, we then consider how programs for cultural and linguistic reform in modern Arab nations created new dialectics between textual and popular culture. Our primary focus is on the use of media in disseminating national culture, circulating minority voices, and reshaping circuits of cultural and religious authority through transnational authorship and reception.

Theatre 210
Ethnography of Performance
Spring 2008

This seminar explores anthropological literatures on ritual performance, speech acts and habitual practice, and links them with performance studies to examine embodiment and performativity in contemporary contexts. Revisiting the boundedness of place in classic ethnography, we will situate performance in a world of mass mediation and ask how it incorporates global knowledge in concrete language and practice.

Sarah Valentine

Russian 30 Russian Literature through World Cinema
Winter 2008
Department of Slavic Languages

Examination of Russian literary masterpieces and their screen adaptations in various national cinematic traditions, with focus on problems of perception and misperception arising when literature is translated into cinema, and one national culture is viewed through the eyes of another.

R32 Russia and Asia: Cultural Dialogues
Spring 2008
Department of Slavic Languages

Since end of Soviet Union, cultural and political flux within non-Christian lands neighboring Russia has increased dramatically. Given radical rejection of Russian heritage in most former Soviet territories, key distinctions in humanities have become unclear, including fundamental confusion between limits of Slavic and Near Eastern studies. Examination of relation of Russia's culture to its borders: Caucasus, Central Asia, China, and Japan.

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows, 2006-08

Elsa Chen

AH 150D--Selected Topics in Contemporary Art
(The Globalization of Contemporary Art: Asian Perspectives)
Winter 2007
Department of Art History

Late twentieth century has witnessed the rise of contemporary art industry. This course aims to look at how flourishing Asian contemporary art has been produced, reproduced and disseminated in the world contemporary art system. This course will try to understand how one of the biggest contemporary art industries, namely the biennale industry, works, and investigate how Asian contemporary art has been situated and circulated within this system. This will be done by exploring selected biennales held in different parts of the world and under similar or different persuasions and also by analyzing some specific work by a few internationally renowned artists of Asian descents who move inside and/or beyond the system.

Chinese 156--Variable Topics in Culture and Society in Taiwan
(Social Interventions and Contemporary Art in Taiwan)
Spring 2007
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures

In the past 400 years, Taiwan has faced rapid and complex political, economic, social and cultural changes. These changes together constitute Taiwan’s unique and intriguing historical and cultural specificity, which would shed light on polemics that concern many people outside Taiwan. This course will explore how visual art and cultures made by contemporary Taiwanese artists engage with selected social, political and cultural issues in Taiwan, or, for overseas Taiwanese artists, in and from the places where they migrated to and live in.

Alessandra Di Maio

Comparative Literature 191, Contemporary Narratives from the African Diaspora
Spring 2007, Spring 2008
Comparative Literature Department

Many scholars and artists from different regions of the planet locate in the Atlantic Ocean, with its slave trade routes, the foundations of the modern, capitalistic world. However, during the last decades, the Mediterranean Basin has become one of the fulcra of a mass-migration movement that engages a great number of nations. Many of the people involved in these migratory patterns are of African descent. Their diaspora has fundamentally contributed to the development of the global discourse on race and ethnicity. By comparing an array of literary and cultural texts from both the so-called Black Atlantic and the Mediterranean, this course analyzes the polyphonic narration of the African diaspora, while exploring in a comparative perspective issues such as race, class, color, minority, transnationalism, nomadism, hybridity, multiculturalism, sexuality and gender construction. The class meets once a week. Screenings of the films Besieged (B. Bertolucci), Jungle Fever (Spike Lee) and La Haine (Kassovitz) will be scheduled.

Italian 221D New Italian Identities: Arts of Migration
Winter 2008
Italian Department

Traditionally a country of emigration, during the last decades Italy has become a hub for immigration for people from various regions of the world, who have arrived by the millions. The arrival of the newcomers has sparked controversy, igniting a heated debate on immigration in Italy and throughout Europe, while urging Italians to re-assess their already composite national identity.
This newly designed graduate course investigates the narration of immigration to Italy by analyzing a number of texts by contemporary migrant Italian artists. Novels, short stories, poems and autobiographical narratives by writers such as Khouma, De Caldas Brito, Ghermandi, Scego and Ali Farah will be examined alongside a selection of films and music. Concepts such as ethnicity, multiculturalism, hybridity, postcoloniality and minority will be explored within the Italian context, while Italian Studies will be brought into dialogue with the most recent debates on transnationalism.

Eulàlia Moles

Spanish 191 A/Chicana/o Studies 188 -- Contemporary Issues of Chicanas
Winter 2007
Spanish and Portuguese Department

This course introduces students to several topics directly impacting Chicanas/ Latinas in the present historical framework of globalization. We will specifically focus on the theme of violence to discuss the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, (trans)national migration, labor, the femicide on the border, health, and Chicana cultural practices. An integral part of the course will be devoted to examining the many different processes that transnational feminist decolonizing practices adopt to denounce, and counteract both personal and structural violence

Spanish 281 -- Studies in Chicana Literature, Contemporary Issues of Chicanas
Winter 2007, Winter 2008
Spanish and Portuguese Department

This seminar introduces students to key concepts related to the theoretical framework of globalization with a special emphasis on how it impacts Chicanas/Latinas. We will discuss how globalization and neoliberalist policies have a profound effect on the "new world border," the femicide on the border, and (trans)national migration and its feminization in the 1990s in the rise of the global economic shifts. We will also carefully examine how transnational feminist decolonizing practices engage with different human rights frameworks in their pursuit of social justice in order to denounce and counteract both personal and structural violence. Different theories informing the emerging field of transnational studies will be explored in the light of the formation of transnational alliances based on the historical and contemporary geopolitical links in the Americas

Babli Sinha

E169--Magical Realism
Winter 2008
English Department

The term magical realism is used to refer to literature that combines elements of the fantastic with realism. It has been suggested that magical realism is a trope for narrating the nation, for imagining utopias, and for resisting restrictive aspects of society. This course will examine the genre, interrogate its relationship to other genres of fantasy, and consider the relationship between the aesthetic patterns of the genre and its potential for social advocacy. We will examine the techniques of magical realism in fiction by Toni Morrison, Ben Okri, Angela Carter, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, and Borges, such as the use of cyclical rather than linear time and the inversion of social hierarchies. We do this in order to understand the ways in which the genre blurs the boundaries of nation, region, race, gender, and class as it challenges our understanding of historical events as being easily defined with logical causes. In addition to poetry, novels, and short stories, we will also be reading secondary texts, including works by Bakhtin, Jameson, Appiah, and Bhabha.

E118--Film and Literature
Spring 2008
English Department

In this course we will be examining visual culture in literature and film. How has the cinema relied on literary conventions, from subtitles to literary adaptations? How does the pace of editing in the cinema manifest itself in some post-modern literary works? Is the cinema more commodified and corrupted than literature? How do literature and film differ in terms of narration? Does film dull our senses or invigorate our perception of the world? Can cinema render an “inner speech”? We will address these topics by studying a range of literature, film adaptations, and critical texts as well as texts of various media that are preoccupied with both the literary and the visual. Literature will be by Conrad, Maugham, Chandler, Nabokov, and Rushdie, and we will be watching films by Frears, Chaplin, Hawks, and Kubrik. In addition, critical texts by Schlovsky, Eisenstein, Mitchell, Genette, and Bluestone will be assigned.

E169--Narrative and the English Modernist Novel
Spring, 2007
English Department

This course will investigate some of the central issues of narrative in the English modernist novel. Among the questions we will consider are the following: How did modernist novelists transform conventions of narrative form? How did these diverse writers posit new and “modern” representations of the self, challenge linear notions of history, boundaries of masculinity and femininity, of self and other? We will answer these questions through a study of literature and essays from the period, including works by Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, Ford, and Woolf.

E118--The British Imperial Romance and its Critics
Winter, 2007
English Department

The imperial romance celebrated imperialism as standing for chivalry and civilization. It contrasted the colonizer and the colonized, associating the colonizer with cultural superiority and modernity and the colonized with superstition and primitivism. We will study some of the most influential and controversial texts and films from this genre produced in Britain from the 1890s to the 1940s and set in South Asia and South Africa. We will consider how they promoted colonial service and defended the British empire at a time when colonialism faced criticism at home and abroad.

This course will simultaneously think about how these texts were received by their readers and viewers around the world. As these texts and films were disseminated, they prompted adaptations and the creation of new narratives about modernity. What did these readers find inspiring or offensive about these stories? How did they express their reactions? How did the story of imperialism and modernity change as a result of these responses? How did these stories affect the way in which we understand history and identity? Literature and film critiquing the imperial romance will also date from the 1890s to the 1940s. They will be accompanied by historical and theoretical readings. Texts include works by Anand, Kipling, Forster, Haggard, Plaatje, and Schreiner along with three films, King Solomon’s Mines, Gunga Din, and The Rains Came.