Louise Bourgeois, Cell (Red Room), Courtesy of lightsgoingon
Violence as Politics
How does politics situate itself vis-à-vis violence? What are the historical and theoretical legitimations upon which the political attempts to absolve, regulate, or incorporate violence? What gets counted as violence and what are the global prototypes of the violence of modern political systems? This course works through these questions by largely focusing on four modern political phenomena: Imperialism, Nationalism, (Post-)Colonialism, and Biopolitics.
Intro to Theory and Critique
This course is an introduction to core concepts in critical theory from the critical traditions of Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and critical race studies. Students learn the theoretical foundations of concepts such as critique, ideology, power, subjectivity, freedom, and resistance and discuss their political relevance for understanding gender, class, race, and ethnicity, and the histories of capitalism, colonialism, and migration across geographies and social contexts.
Sexual Politics in Transnational Perspective
This class comparatively examines how sexuality and gender intersected with politics to shape modern societies. We will address the global dimensions of sexuality, but our readings will primarily focus on developments in Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. Our weekly discussions will revolve around several interesting themes, including gender-role construction, theories of sexual identity, state regulation of sexual behavior, and rise of LGBTQ emancipation movements. After discussing the significance of these themes on the local level, we will then examine them within large cultural, social and transnational contexts.
Contemporary Theories of Gender
What does it mean to be man, woman, human, and other? Where do our ideas of sexual difference, gender roles, and sexual desires come from? This course traces the thinking of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will explore the central debates among feminist scholars regarding the stability and the relation between these categories. The first half of the course establishes a firm grounding in the structural and post-structural conversation, mostly between French feminists and queer theorists. In the remainder of the course we will look at the political, economic, and legal manifestations of gender, as well as post-colonial and intersectional themes put forth by Indigenous, Black, and Muslim, feminists. The course will end by a brief discussion of the limits of thinking gender through humanism.
Women and Gender in Western Political Thought
This course examines history of political thought from the perspective of gender relations and the treatment of women. We will be asking two key questions: What are the ways in which women and other minorities have been excluded, erased, and discounted from theorizations of the political? And how do such exclusions determine the conceptions of justice, power, equality, and freedom that have been hitherto inscribed by white men?
Global Wars in the Middle East
Why are multiple states at war in the Middle East? The common explanations of conflict in the region tend towards religious, ethnic, and sectarian frames of analysis. This course seeks to unpack the historical, economic, and ecological conditions that have enabled the narratives of so-called “sectarian violence.” In doing so, we will inquire into how imperial, colonial, and post-colonial relations of power have created and maintained modern infrastructures of violence in the region. We will also study how the contemporary global flows of capital and bodies posit the Middle East as a hot zone for contested global interests. Finally, we will explore the possibilities opened by indigenous cultures and networks of transnational solidarity and resistance to formulate a political imaginary beyond nationalism or tribalism.
Global Works in Antiquity: The Promise of Politics
How have the various traditions of ancient thought posed and dealt with the fundamental questions of human existence? How do we love, how do we lose, and how do we remedy our collective suffering? This course begins with a comparative reading of two foundational tragic stories between two former waring civilizations, the Persians and the Greeks. We will then follow through with how the Greek tradition sought to resolve the pains of human suffering through politics. In the final section of the course, we look at how Confucius and the Biblical tradition sought to address human suffering by disciplining the soul.
Global Works in a Changing World: Origins of Political Theology
What are the roots of ideas of modern government and how do they relate to religion? How do the techniques of ruling over a people in a territorial unity protected by arms justify themselves? To answer these and similar questions, this course opens in its first part with a primary religious text of the 7th C., The Quran, and moves on to examine various medieval theological modes of imagining collective life including in the Catholic, Protestant, and Mystic traditions. In the second half, we turn to modern theories of the state and social contracts, inquiring into how, even where it is not directly visible, notions of power, freedom, sovereignty, nature, war, and property are intertwined with an understanding of a world at the center of which lies the idea of a singular God. Our main goal in this course is to find critical ways to think about the today increasingly important equations between theology and politics.
Global Works in Modernity: The Task of Critique
How can we begin to develop an understanding of society and politics that is oriented towards change? What is critical thinking and how does the tradition of the Enlightenment attend to it? This course studies the European tradition of critique as well as the critiques of this tradition that emerge from using its tools against itself. The first month of the course focuses on 19th C visions of critique as the roots of authority in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill. The second part of the course delves into relations of how labor, language, and emotions create our values and how a will to change the dominant values would require a change in such relations. Here we will read late 19th and early 20th C thinkers Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In the last part, drawing on the works of Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir, we take on the existentialist critique which is grounded in the lived experience of oppressed subjects.