CORE 104: Change and the Future

Professor Olivia C. Harrison, Departments of French and Italian, Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies, and American Studies and Ethnicity

“They are together and have the hope of a revolution.”

—Jean Genet, center, quoted in Twenty-Two Hours, directed by Bouchra Khalili (2018)

Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, Palestine: these are the names of some of the most iconic causes of the twentieth century. These struggles were waged on the ground, but they also drew support from across the world, in the form of manifestos, films, essays, protest movements, and consumer boycotts. What did it mean to commit to these struggles then? What do these solidarity movements mean to us now? In the wake of #BlackLivesMatter and the ongoing migrant crisis, the history of anticolonial and antiracist solidarity has a lot to teach us about what it means to take up the cause of the other. In this class we will travel back to several key moments that will help us articulate the points of convergence and friction between commitment and complicity: the Haitian revolution, World War II, the Algerian war of independence, the Palestinian question, and the migrant rights movement, to name a few. Our corpus will stretch across genres and media, with essays by Jean Genet and Valeria Luiselli; poems by Aimé Césaire and Mahmoud Darwish; novels by William Gardner Smith and Nathacha Appanah; films by Santiago Álvarez and Gillo Pontecorvo; literary journals of the Global South such as Lotus and Souffles-Anfas; and multimedia work by Fazal Sheikh and Bouchra Khalili.

Texts (subject to change) 

Aimé Césaire. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

—. Discourse on Colonialism.

Kate Evans. Threads: From the Refugee Crisis.

Frantz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth.

Jean Genet. “Four Hours in Shatila.”

Olivia C. Harrison, ed. Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics.

Valeria Luiselli. Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions.

Gillo Pontecorvo, dir. The Battle of Algiers.

Alain Resnais, dir. Night and Fog.

Joe Sacco. Footnotes in Gaza.

William Gardner Smith. The Stone Face.

Professor Neetu Khanna, Department of Comparative Literature

This course takes a transnational approach to contemporary feminist philosophy and theories of gender and sexuality, and charts key interventions in literary studies and critical theory. This course will cover debates in feminist movements and critical schools with a particular focus on theories of race and the body, including queer and trans* studies, postcolonial studies and critical race studies, global Marxisms, psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, affect and emotion studies, new materialisms and ecocriticism. This course will also place these readings alongside contemporary art and popular culture with an eye to the place of gender and sexuality within current movements for liberation and social transformation.

Texts (subject to change)

Readings will include seminal texts by feminist theorists such as Sarah Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Judith

Butler, Mel Chen, Bell Hooks, Jack Halberstam, Saidiya Hartman and Jose Munoz.

Steven Canals, Brad Falchuk, Ryan Murphy. Pose.

Professor Alice Echols, Departments of History and Gender and Sexuality Studies

No decade carries more symbolic heft or has attracted more attention from writers, scholars, and

pundits than the 1960s. For the right, it was the worst of times, when America went off the rails as a pernicious culture of excess and permissiveness gripped the country. For the left, it was a time of democratic hope as racial and sexual minorities, women, and young people challenged the country to commit itself to its core principles of liberty and freedom for one and all. Yet what many accounts — right and left — share is the belief that the decade represented a moment of sudden rupture. This course pushes back against the idea of Sixties exceptionalism by showing that change stretched back to the 1950s and extended well into the Seventies, and by demonstrating that the transformations we associate with this decade had longer histories than is often acknowledged. 

This CORE 104 familiarizes students with the protest movements of the 1960s — the movement to end the war in Vietnam, the struggles of racial and sexual minorities, feminism, the hippie counterculture — and the backlash against them. Indeed, we will also examine resurgent conservatism as it grows in the wake of what many considered the end of a viable conservatism, that is, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s terrible defeat in 1964. Throughout, we will study the formidable obstacles progressive activists faced. We will also explore how activists sometimes ended up advancing ideas and approaches that unintentionally helped pave the way for some of the neoliberal economic policies and conservative politics that hold sway today. We will be attentive to the ways that the ideas of even the most seemingly radical activists, despite their best efforts, could remain embedded within the ideologies of the dominant culture. Indeed, this class will deepen your appreciation of the formidable obstacles facing those trying to achieve fundamental change in American society.

This class is discussion based so come to class prepared to discuss what’s been assigned for that day.

Texts (subject to change)

Christian G. Appy. American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity.

Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds. Takin’ It to the Streets: A Sixties Reader.

James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time.

Alice Echols. Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life & Times of Janis Joplin.