Past Courses

SPAN 604: Seminar in Gender and Sexuality in Spain and Latin America Gender and Sexuality in Latin American and Spanish Cinema Spring 2021, Tuesdays from 2 pm to 4:50 pm, THH 116 and ONLINE

Through the study of gender and sexual discourses in Latin American and Spanish cinema, this seminar will look at issues that affect our globalized society, in general, and Latin American and Spanish societies, in particular, including marginality and exclusion, memory and trauma, exile and migration, or the nation and globalization, to   name just a few. We will explore feminist and queer film theory to address these issues, as well as relying on philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to the study of cinema. Films studied include (but not be limited to):  Before Night Falls (Julian Schnabel, 2001), Carmen Miranda: Bananas is My Business (Helen Solberg, 1995), Um Passaporte Húngaro (Sandra Kogut 2001), A hora da estrela (Suzana Amaral, 1985), Fresa y chocolate (Tomás Gutiérrez-Alea, 1994), Todo sobre mi madre (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999), Pixote (Héctor Babenco, 1981), or Plata quemada (Marcelo Piñeyro, 2000). Theorists studied will include (but not be limited to): Sara Ahmed, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas, José Muñoz, Herbert Marcuse, or Suely Rolnik.

This course aims to introduce students to the defining debates of the Enlightenment in two very different places—France and Russia—that nonetheless have in common a commitment to political absolutism. We will take a comparative approach to the study of the Enlightenment period—a key moment in the transition toward modernity—in order to give students a more nuanced understanding of how the cultural myths and ideals that have come to define the era are both specific to their context, and developed in conversation with other perspectives, narratives, and models. By the conclusion to the course, students will have broad knowledge of two very distinct Enlightenment contexts, and a sense of the way in which the “timeline” of Enlightenment varies across cultures, often in surprising (and enlightening) ways.

Postcolonial theory has always drawn on multilinguistic and transnational materials. Among the many histories it has revisited, the history of French colonization and its consequences occupy a privileged place. This seminar will survey the Francophone postcolonial context to  demonstrate that the multicontinental territory that was the French empire, now called the “French-speaking world,” has generated not only emblematic events (such as the Haitian Revolution or the Algerian War), but also a sophisticated critical discourse meant to uncover their particularities and historical significance....

The texts we will read come from across the Francophone world: The Caribbean (Jean-Price Mars, Suzanne Césaire, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Edouard Glissant); the Maghreb (Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar), sub-Saharan Africa (Léopold Sédar Senghor, Achille Mbembe,); Europe (Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Françoise Verges, David Murphy, Charles Forsdick); and North America (Dominic Thomas, Christopher Miller, Adlai Murdoch).

The ultimate goal of this course is simultaneously to highlight the unique critical gestures of this corpus, all while bringing it back into communication with the larger postcolonial debates that define the field as a whole.

It is by now a commonplace to evoke the ubiquity of screens and their impact on every facet of our daily life... In short, screens are not only used to hawk goods, elicit desires, disseminate cultural values, they are an integral part of the cinematic
apparatus..

We will screen and study very different movie genres such as the Lumière’s actualités, the war movie like Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers or Pierre Schoendoerffer’s The 317th Section, the political essay fi lms of Chris Marker, Raoul Peck, Harun Farocki, and the multiscreen video art installation of Din Q Lê. For the fi nal paper, seminar participants are encouraged to work on a  project that will question old or new practices and uses of the screen in a domain of research  congruent with their disciplinary training.

“Toute la Philosophie, lui dis-je, n’est fondée que sur deux choses, sur ce que l’on a l’esprit curieux et les yeux mauvais.”
Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

How can we account for the “plurality of worlds” that we inhabit? In this course we will explore the French Enlightenment as creator (and destroyer) of worlds—in its utopianisms, in its scientific and travel narratives, in its libertine and moralizing fictions. The question of possible worlds informs eighteenth-century theories of the cosmos, but also shapes the eighteenth-century novel in its most literal and fantastical dimensions. Fiction becomes a space for the exploration of marvelous new worlds and for the production of a new “worldliness.” ...
The goal of this seminar is to provide students with an overview of key debates and methods in French eighteenth-century studies; the problem of “other worlds”—worlds imagined, made, explored, conquered—will serve as our guiding thread throughout this inquiry. Students from other disciplines welcome; the course will be taught in French, with accommodations for students who are not in the French doctoral track. Authors to be studied will include: Diderot, Fénelon, Fontenelle, de Gouges, Marivaux, Mercier, Voltaire.

Fifty years ago, Algeria celebrated its independence from France, after one of the most protracted and iconic decolonization struggles of the twentieth century. Alternatively called a war, a revolution, or simply “the events,” the conflict opposing France and its colony, but also pro- and anti-colonial Algerians and  French(wo)men, has been depicted and debated in memoirs, essays, novels, plays, and films on both sides of the Mediterranean from the 1950s to the present day. This seminar will examine the ways in which the Algerian war of independence has shaped French and Algerian politics, culture, and civil society, as well as global emancipatory and imperialist discourses. Topics will include historiography and testimony, terrorism and torture, and women and war.

Readings and discussion in French and English.

While the crime narrative is as old as the Bible...one can also argue that crime fiction especially crystallizes certain crises and contradictions of modernity. In twentieth and twenty-first century crime narrative forms we witness the post/ colonial emergence of modern modes of identity formation and identification; the reconstitution of ideas about truth-telling and truth-seeking in relationship to testimony and confession; and new sciences of the evidentiary, of truth and of power.

In this course, we will consider “noir fiction” as the intersectional site of transatlantic relations between ideas about modernity, blackness, and a critique of Enlightenment operated in and through crime fiction narratives...In other words, noir and crime fiction offer sites for the exploration of modern and postmodern relationships between narrative form, representations of racial difference, and a range of
ideas about blackness, opacity, criminality, and fugitivity.

Palestine has been a point of identification and rallying cry in postcolonial France, from the comités Palestine formed after May ‘68 to the BDS campaigns of the 2000s. This seminar explores the continued centrality of the Palestinian question in French social and cultural texts, from Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Genet to Sakinna Boukhedenna and Mohamed Rouabhi. We will situate French engagements with the Palestinian question within a global context of pro-Palestinian activism, culminating in current indigenous mobilizations around Palestine, from Chiapas to the Parisian banlieue. Readings to include Sartre, Derrida, Rancière, Badiou, Genet, Ross, Boukhedenna, Rouabhi, and others. Readings and class discussion in French.