Courses

CTIH-T600, “Black Aesthetics: Johnson, James, Soyinka, Akomfrah” 
Akin Adesokan (Comparative Literature)
Mondays, 12:45 PM - 3:15 PM
This course meets with CMLT-C 602 and MSCH-C 620

This seminar approaches the writings and creative works of four figures in modern Black arts and letters as theoretical elaborations of aesthetic issues in emergent subjectivity: the nexus between political emancipation and the growth of Negro spirituals and “popular forms” (Johnson and James); genres as critiques or rejections of imposed philosophical systems in postcolonial and expatriated contexts (Soyinka and Akomfrah); political personality as a sublimation of potent forces realized in modern tragic forms (James and Soyinka); and individual creativity navigating the terrains of ideas and practices presumed as common property (Johnson and Akomfrah). Each of the clusters will be organized as generational and generic contestations or conversations that articulate with concepts of authorship, orality, biopiracy, cultural property as well as with mostly political ones such as identity, embodiment, and nationalism in interlocking sites of Black creativity—the US, the Caribbean, the African continent, and Europe. 

Additional authors may include Sylvia Wynter, Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Coco Fusco, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and Amilcar Cabral. Viewings will include films and artworks by Julie Dash, John Akomfrah, Ousmane Sembene, Gurinder Chadha, Ibrahim El-Salahi, El Anatsui, and Ousmane Sow.

This seminar will not require prior knowledge of any of the four primary figures or their historical contexts. Seminar expectations include a class presentation; active participation in discussion; and a final project (term paper; annotated bibliography, or syllabus).

CTIH-T600, “Literature between Theory and History”
Oana Panaïté (French and Italian)
Wednesdays, 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Meets with FRIT-F 667

This seminar begins from the recognition that literature in French is inseparable from the colonial and racial imaginaries that underwrote its very emergence as “literature.” Far from being marginal or supplementary, these imaginaries are constitutive, shaping the categories of universality and aesthetic value that continue to structure reading practices. As Françoise Vergès has argued, the afterlives of slavery and colonialism persist not only in political institutions but in the symbolic regimes through which literature is read and canonized. To study these texts, then, is to confront the persistence of race as a disavowed but structuring principle. At the same time, the French-speaking world has been a laboratory of counter-discourses and alternative epistemologies. Édouard Glissant’s poétique de la relation reframes literature as a practice of opacity and entanglement, undoing national frameworks and opening to transoceanic circulation. Achille Mbembe’s reflections on necropolitics and postcolony insist on the need to read literature as an archive of domination and survival, while Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s work on translation and plural universality calls for reconceiving world literature as an ethics of encounter rather than a hierarchy of cultural capital. Together, these perspectives remind us that literature is not merely reflective but generative: a site where new theoretical languages emerge from within practices of writing and reading.

The seminar will engage texts from Metropolitan France, the Caribbean, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and Canada with the objective of rethinking how literary histories of literature in French can be imagined and written today. Rather than treating categories such as nation, race, language, or tradition as stable points of reference, we will examine them as historically contingent and theoretically contested constructs that both enable and constrain literary historiography. A central goal will be to ask how comparative and relational approaches can generate alternative genealogies - ones attentive to colonial entanglements, racial formations, translingual, and transoceanic circulations that have long been marginalized or disavowed in conventional narratives of French literature. We will also attend to the question of form: how novels, essays, poetry, and theory overlap and contaminate one another, creating hybrid practices that not only challenge existing models of periodization and genre but also enact new ways of conceiving literary history. By the end of the seminar, students will be equipped to interrogate literary history not as a fixed or neutral chronicle but as a critical practice, and to envision new histories of literature in French that foreground relation, plurality, and the inseparability of aesthetics, theory, and politics.

CTIH-T700, Independent Study in Critical Theory (1-4 credit hours)

Students may receive credit for work done in the Center reading group. To be arranged with the convener(s) of the reading of group.

CTIH-T600, “Post-Marxism: From Italian Labor to Global Social Movements”
Edgar Illas (Spanish and Portuguese)
Wednesdays, 4:20 - 6:50 PM

This course will study the Italian post-Marxist theories of the 1970s on the autonomy of labor and their political materialization in the social movement in the twenty-first century. Building on Marx’s philosophical analysis of the mode of production and responding to new expansions of the capitalist system, Italian workerism relocated the motor of social production from the logic of capital to the self-governing force of labor. This rearrangement entailed a series of shifts at three main different levels. First, the analysis of economic exploitation moved from material production, value, and the factory to immaterial labor, debt, and all the spaces of the social, including those of domestic and affective labor. Second, political practice changed its focus from the relation between people and state to the movements of the multitude, constituent power, and the commons. Third, philosophical premises were reconceived along the lines of contingency and immanence instead of historical necessity and dialectics. We will study these conceptual developments as theorized by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Paolo Virno, Silvia Federici, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Franco Berardi, among others.

The course will also reflect on the transposition of these theories onto the global context through the works written by Negri and Michael Hardt, which became a theoretical guide for anti-globalization movements since the early 2000s. We will historicize the social movement as a political expression of autonomism. We will also question the limits and effectiveness of this political form, especially in relation to more recent mutations in global capitalism involving direct violence and war.

Possible Texts:

Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State
---. Marx in Movement: Operaismo in Context
Mario Tronti, Workers and Capital
Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude
Maurizzio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor”
Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy 
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation
Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, The Politics of Operations. Excavating Contemporary Capitalism
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
Michael Hardt, ed., Radical thought in Italy: A Potential Politics.

CTIH-T600, “Magic Theory”
Rebekah Sheldon (English)
Tuesdays, 5:30 - 8:30 PM
Meets together with ENG-L 764

This course concerns the role of magic and mysticism in major works of literary theory. Drawing on my current book projects, I invite graduate students to think with me about why and how magic and mysticism appear in literary theory and what happens to our understanding of literary theory when we draw attention to their presence. 

Readings will center on major works of literary and critical theory, supplemented by readings in the occult tradition and contextualizing essays. The first half of the course will focus on magic and will include units on J.L. Austin's speech act theory and theories of performance and performativity (e.g. José Esteban Muñoz); deconstructive theories of language, paying special attention to the role of Theuth in Jacques Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy"; the labor of vibration as a key term in Gilles Deleuze and Deleuzian-inspired new materialist thinkers (e.g. Elizabeth Grosz); and the figure of the chora as it winds through and skeins together each of these moments. The second half of the course will focus on mysticism and will consider the shared structure of feeling between mysticism (especially the medieval mystical tradition) and psychoanalysis (especially Jacan Lacan) and Afro-pessimism's theories of unworlding. 

Some familiarity with literary theory would be helpful but not required; no prior knowledge of magic or mysticism will be need for the course, though students are invited to share their experiences and encouraged to pursue their own research projects in line with the course content.

CTIH-T700, Independent Study in Critical Theory (1-4 credit hours)

Students may receive credit for work done in the Center reading group. To be arranged with the convener(s) of the reading of group.