COURSES FOR SPRING 2004The listings here are designed to allow Unit students to easily find and select courses relevant to their interests across a wide range of disciplines. All the courses listed here are suitable for fulfilling Unit Certification Requirements. You should note, however, that this list is not exhaustive; with the permission of the Unit Director, courses not listed here may be counted toward certification. Anthropology 330 – The history and historiography of anthropology Communications 308 – Cultural Analysis of Screen Media Communications 475 – Proseminar in Cultural Studies and Critical Interpretations Communications 490 – Political Economy of Global Information and Communication Communications 490 – Transnational Multicultural studies Comparative Lit 396 – Violence and Space Educational Policy Studies490– Critical Race Theory English 437 – Seminar in Victorian Literature: Realism :Dickens and Elliot English 463 – Seminar in Literary Themes and Movements - Americas Studies: Reading Hemispherically English 481 – Seminar in Literary Theory and Criticism – Frankfurt School Aesthetics English 482 – Topics in Research, Inquiry and Writing Studies – Classical Rhetoric French 478/CLIT 478/WS490 – Post-Modern Sexualities: From Lust to Lucky Pierre History 487A – Latinos and Cities: Culture, Race and Community History 487B – Slaver, Expansion and Race in Antebellum U.S. History 487C – Disease, Bodies, and Society History 490A – History and Social Theory History 492C – Travel and Travelogues History 492D – Race and Science Landscape Architecture 490 – Race and Space: Constructing Identities/Constructing Place Philosophy 312/412 – Classical Modern Philosophers Philosophy 401 – Philosophical Anthropology Sociology 482 – Globalization: Dynamics and Debates Sociology 482 – Science and Technology studies: The mangle of practice Spanish 442 – Urban Desire: Sex and the City in Caribbean Cultures Speech Comm 438 – Rhetorics of Globalization and Empire Women’s Studies 396R – Representing Sex, Power, and Politics Women’s Studies 396SC – Real or Imagined Women?: Subjectivities in Postcolonial Histories Women’s Studies 490CM – Sexuality, Education and Varieties of Queerness Anthropology 330 The History and Historiography of Anthropology. Professor Matti Bunzl Office: 386B Davenport Hall PH: 265-4068 bunzl@uiuc.edu This course will provide a selective overview of the history and historiography of anthropology in the 19th and 20th centuries. The class will move chronologically and topically, paying particular attention to the social, institutional, and historical contexts of paradigmatic shifts, the interconnections between various national traditions, and the negotiations of the discipline's boundaries. Within this framework, we will be especially concerned with the historicization of American anthropology, comparing its conceptual organization to other national traditions and exploring the unique perspectives it engenders. Students will be encouraged to pursue their individual interest in the history and theory of anthropology. Comm/Sp Com 308-1- Hay This course is an advanced introduction to issues, concepts, and forms of analysis in media and cultural studies. Each semester the course focuses on a specific topic. This semester the course will examine the changing relation of media and other technologies to house and home in the U.S. It will consider the domestic sphere as concept (represented and defined through media such as television) and as a setting where various media are installed and engaged. Other issues to be considered include concepts and practices of (domestic) labor and leisure, changing conceptions and relations of the public and private sphere, concepts of Home, the regulation of media and domestic space, the regulation of privacy, the changing relation of household media to one another and to other domestic appliances, the relation of media to architecture, lawn and garden, interior design, and furnishings, the relation between media and suburbanization, the relation between media and urban _gentrification,_ the home as a site of citizenship, the home as a site of consumption, and the formation of social relations through media technologies from the home. (For a longer course description contact Prof. Hay at <j-hay@uiuc.edu>.) Comm/EPS 475-G - McCarthy This course will offer students the opportunity to become familiar with the history, applications and limitations of several theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary culture and popular media that have been developed in the emergent research field known as cultural studies. It is intended to provide students with analytical frameworks for understanding contemporary cultural life. Debates and issues within cultural studies and debates between cultural studies and other schools of thought will serve as the organizing agenda for exploring the relationships between culture, experience and unequal social relations of gender, race, class, nation, and sexuality; youth cultures, resistance through rituals; popular culture, power and public policy; cultural imperialism and center-periphery relations; poststructuralism and its implications for the study of culture; and the impact of cultural studies across the disciplines. This course is interdisciplinary and should be of interest to students with backgrounds in several different areas, including a) research methods that combine textual analysis of contemporary popular media and culture with sociological analysis; b) theoretical encounters and bridges between continental thought and American traditions; c) feminist theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, cultural geography, psychoanalysis, queer theory, marxist political economy analysis, postcolonialism and critical race theory; and d) the application of literary and rhetorical theories to the media and popular culture. The pro-seminar will meet twice per week (for approximately 2 hours per session). Comm 490-T/LIS 450-GC Schiller The Political Economy of Global Information and Communication is an entry-level Ph.D. research seminar; it assumes no previous knowledge in the area. To acquaint graduate students with leading themes and breaking research in the field, we will read 6-8 recent monographs and critically assess them. Each student will also write a long research paper, working closely with the two professors. Themes of direct interest to understanding the structure and control of global communications and information in today's world include the rise of vertically integrated, transnational corporations in this sector, alongside the characteristically recent emergence throughout much of the world of national and regional units of capital; the ongoing transformation of the earlier system based on cultural/informational exports and imports by transnationalized production and distribution systems; institutionally stratified opportunities to influence the informational environment; stratified access to communications systems and services; attempts to expand private property rights in information and culture; propaganda in the contemporary world; ways of evaluating the changing economic importance of the information and communications sector. Within the study of communications and popular culture, only recently have we begun to consider the integrated study of issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class from a global perspective. Given that such an enterprise requires the study of many related and overlapping but previously separate disciplines, this course strives to provide illumination on areas of intersection while including contemporary approaches aiming toward a communications studies framework of analysis. Communications studies are a highly diverse interdiscipline so that in case you might be unfamiliar with it, you should have no difficulty finding a place within its broad terrain. Furthermore, given that one of the themes is “global/local” our attention will include issues of border studies and national [US] immigration and constructions of difference as they are related to the transnational. Since the bulk of the literature comes from an interdisciplinary set of sources ranging from international communication studies, postcolonial studies, Latin American Studies, English literature, anthropology, US Latina/o studies, feminist and multicultural studies, we will, in fact, be building and creating a framework of analysis and highlighting the connections, theoretically and methodologically, which allow for the study of transnational and multicultural issues within communications. Toward this end, we will examine several case studies in the third part of the semester. Comp Lit 396-A – Violence and Space - Prof. Herscher - Tu/Th 3:00-4:20pm - English 123 From sites defined by remembered or anticipated damage, through injuries located in “domestic” space or “natural” disaster, to geographies of centers of power and peripheries of fear, insecurity and terror, violence is enmeshed with the spatial. Yet violence does not simply occur in space; rather, violence always transforms space, a transformation that is left unanalyzed when violence is understood merely as a rationalized instrument of power and space is understood as a container or context in which that instrument is applied. Approaching violence as a situated social practice and space as a social product, this course will focus on where and how violence takes place. Against the prevailing understanding of violence as a means to gain control of space or destroy space, we will here examine violence as a production or reproduction of space that engenders subjects, objects, and extrinsic sites of power, authority and domination. The course will thus offer a re-assessment of readings of violence that are based on or invoke pre-constituted subjects or communities, imagined or actual; territorial referents; civil laws; origin myths; or “power” separated from situated practice. In so doing, we will approach “space” as a phenomenon encompassing forms, from the bodily to the territorial; representations, both visual and textual; and practices, from the quotidian to the professional. We will thereby move back and forth from the sites of buildings, cities and nations, through textual representations of journalism and literature and visual representations of photography and film, to the practices of architecture, urbanism and everyday life. The course will be organized in four parts. In the first part, we will examine and discuss a set of concepts for theorizing space from geography and urban studies, focusing on the work of Lefebvre. In the second part, we will examine and discuss a set of concepts for theorizing violence from the work of anthropologists such as Appadurai, Daniel and Feldman. In the third part, we will explore the relationship between space and violence through case studies of episodes of war, terrorism and civil conflict, such as the bombing of Dresden during the Second World War, the 1985 Handsworth Uprising in the United Kingdom, and “ethnic cleansing” in the 1998-99 Kosovo Conflict. In the fourth part, students will present their own research on topics related to the course themes. This organization should not be construed to mean, however, that the outcomes of the course are at all pre-determined; rather, the course is conceived as an open framework to initiate, develop and intensify thinking on space, violence and their interactions, and to unfold within the various disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts that course participants bring. Educational Policy Studies 490 – Critical Race Theory - Parker Course Overview: This seminar will focus on critical race theory (CRT) as a critique of racism in the law and society and discuss current applications of CRT to the field of education. The writings in this area have been developed mainly through the legal and education scholarship of Derrick Bell, Mari Matsuda, Richard Delgado, Kimberlie Crenshaw, Daniel Soloranzo, Gloria Ladson Billings and William Tate. Critical race theory has its roots in previous discipline-based critiques related to the history, philosophy, politics and social construction and reality of race and discrimination. Given this foundation, CRT has evolved around a number of general themes: 1) racism is a normal daily fact of life in society and the ideology and assumptions of racism are ingrained in the political and legal structures as to be almost unrecognizable. Legal racial designations have complex, historical and socially constructed meanings that insure the location of political superiority of racially marginalized groups; 2) as a form of oppositional scholarship, CRT challenges the experience of White European Americans as the normative standard; rather, CRT grounds its conceptual framework in the distinctive contextual experiences of people of color and racial oppression through the use of literary narrative knowledge and story-telling to challenge the existing social construction of race; and 3) CRT attacks liberalism and the inherent belief in the law to create an equitable just society. CRT advocates have pointed to the frustrating legal pace of meaningful reform that has eliminated blatant hateful expressions of racism, but has kept intact exclusionary relations of power as exemplified by the legal conservative backlash of the courts, legislative bodies, voters, etc., against "special rights for racially marginalized groups." English 427 R SEMINAR IN RESTORATION AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE, Markley TOPIC: Trade, Colonialism, and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century This seminar will explore the complex relations among trade, colonialism and literature (fictional and non-fictional) in the second half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on the work of a variety of feminist and postcolonial theorists as well as on work in economic history and historical ecology, we will read and discuss some of the major texts of the period as well as a number of narratives that traditionally have not made it into the canon. Participants in the seminar will be encouraged to explore projects that resonate beyond the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Those students who are not primarily scholars of the early modern period are more than welcome to use the seminar in ways that will further their own interests and research. This seminar will devote attention to texts concerned with the Far East as well as those set in or concerned primarily with the Americas. Some of the topics we will adrress include the literature of commerce and its effects on the literature of the period; reactions to the European the slave trade in Africa and the Americas; recent trends in postcolonial criticism; representations of the native woman as “other” in light of recent feminist criticism; piracy and piratical literature and its influence on the development of the novel; and the limitations of British commerical and naval power in the South Seas and the Far East. The texts we will read include Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter; John Dryden’s The Indian Queen, “Annus Mirabilis,” and Aureng-Zebe; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the little-read but extraordinarily popular (in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe; Captain Singleton; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters; Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and poems and letters by (among others) Samuel Johnson, John Dyer, Oliver Goldsmith, Joseph Addison, Behn, Swift, and others. Theory and secondary criticism will include works by feminist scholars (Felicity Nussbaum, Laura Brown, Bridget Orr, Heidi Hutner; Charlotte Sussman); historians and historical ecologists (Jack Goldstone, Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, Carole Crumley); and postcolonial critics (Peter Hulme, Stephen Greenblatt, Michael Neill, Hans Turley, Robert Young, Rajani Sudan, Srinivas Aravamudan). Students will write a long seminar paper, a shorter paper, and two brief annotated bibliographies—one on current criticism or theory, and one on a primary text available in the Library. English 437 G SEMINAR IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE, Garrett. W 3-4:50 TOPIC: Realism: Dickens and Eliot Realism is a slippery and suspect concept, but it is indispensable for studying Victorian fiction. It’s slippery because it has been used in so many differing ways, suspect because it always carries ideological baggage. Even if we are careful to restrict its scope, specifying “realist” as a nineteenth-century period style rather than invoking a transhistorical notion of the “realistic,” we must contend with its applicability to novelists as different as Dickens and Eliot. Realism is nevertheless indispensable because the claims by these and several other Victorian novelists to offer truthful representations of social and psychological reality are a crucial part of their bid for cultural authority, and we need to understand how those claims were established and contested. This seminar will read work by Dickens and Eliot from early, middle, and late stages of their careers, as well as both contemporary and later critical and theoretical accounts, considering how their fiction explores both the power and limits of realism. TEXTS: Dickens, Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend; Eliot, Essays, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda English 453 G SEMINAR IN LATER AMERICAN LITERATURE, Foote. M 3-4:50 TOPIC: Realism and the Age of Distinction in Late Nineteenth Century U .S. Literature Literary histories commonly call the late nineteenth century in the US the “age of realism,” but no term was more contested than the “real.” In the literary and social arenas, mechanisms for determining who and what counted as real were multiplying. But at the same time, opportunities to change one’s social place or to become someone else, even if momentarily, were increasingly available. This class will track two narratives that intersect with the crisis of the real in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One trajectory of the class will give students of American literature and culture some grounding in the debate over the value of the genre of realism in literary history. We will look at the self-conscious formation of realism, studying its relationship to the social field that produced it and that it in turn helped to produce. We will look at the strategies of the realists for making sense of a world whose very social multiplicity challenged any easy ways to classify persons. We will also look at the tradition of literary criticism in the United States that helped to privilege realism as the generic totem of the nineteenth century. The second trajectory of this class will contextualize our inquiry into realism. As we look at debates over the meaning and proper expression of the real, we will also look closely at the development of the social world as an object of study itself. Through the lens of social distinction and the rise of the middle class, we will study the meaning of the social distinctions that helped to create the middle class readers of realism. How were they solicited by advertisements? How did they make (quite unstable) distinctions between high and low culture? How did they understand the relationship between money and status? How did the category we now think of as “class” develop as a cultural sign in the age of realism? Primary texts may include. Novels by Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jacob Riis, Abraham Cahan, Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, selected photographic texts and magazine texts. Secondary reading is likely to include: Bourdieu, Distinctions and The Field of Social Production; Judith Butler, Erving Goffman, Amy Kaplan, Michael Davitt Bell, Richard Brodhead, Brook Thomas, John Kasson, Janice Radway, George Levine, Richard Ohmann, Nancy Glazener. Thorstein Veblen, Althusser, examples of period magazines and advertisements, and a packet of reading consisting of a history of critiques of American realism including Werner Berthoff, Vernon Parrington, Fred Lewis Pattee, and FO Matthiesson. English 463 E SEMINAR IN LITERARY THEMES AND MOVEMENTS, Castro. W 1-2:50 TOPIC: Americas Studies: Reading Hemispherically What happens to our study of American Literature if we read “America” as not simply a synonym for the United States? This seminar explores the recent critical trend toward “New World” or hemispheric focuses, as one aspect of current “post-national” formulations of American Studies. What perspectives on race, nation, slavery, imperialism, and historiography do such vantages afford? While we will sample recent critical writings on the subject (for example, see the January 2003 issue of PMLA, on “America, the Idea, the Literature”), our primary focus will be on two sets of primary texts: First, we will read key theoretical essays on the culture of the Americas by intellectuals from Latin America and the Caribbean--essays whose impact can be traced in the vocabulary of mestizaje, creolization, and hybridity common to both postcolonial and U.S. studies. Here’s a chance to read the essays that helped launch these terms and to evaluate the stakes of their afterlives. Second, we will read selected works of U.S. and Caribbean fiction (from the 19th-century forward) that trace inter-American connections and thus invite us to assess how their narratives of the Americas construct American culture and history. Throughout, we will consider African Diaspora and Latino/a Studies as engines of this current trans-American focus. Essayists will be chosen from among Martí; Vasconcelos; Rodó; Freyre; de Andrade; Ortiz; Paz; Fernandez Retamar; Lamming; CLR James; Fanon; Césaire; Brathwaite; Glissant; García Canclini; and Confiant, Bérnabé, and Chamoiseau. Fiction will be drawn from works by Bryant, Melville, Ruiz de Burton, Delaney, Hopkins, G. Jones, Condé, Cliff, Brodber, and Alvarez. All readings will be available in English, but projects on relevant texts in other languages are more than welcome. In addition to vigorous preparation and participation in discussion, responsibilities include short responses, a class presentation, a five-item annotated bibliography related to your topic, and a final seminar-length paper. English 481 R SEMINAR IN LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM, Hansen. TH 1-2:50 TOPIC: Frankfurt School Aesthetics Contemporary trends in critical theory ranging from Feminism and Marxism to Post-colonialism have re-discovered the work of the Frankfurt School modernists, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Theodor W. Adorno (1902-1969). In fact, it would be fair to say that Benjamin’s writings on technology and art, despite overt ties to Marxian thought, have been appropriated by nearly every theoretical school to emerge in the last thirty years. In addition, spurred in part by recent translations of Aesthetic Theory and Critical Models, English-speaking critics are beginning to grasp the full scope of Adorno’s work, which may well embody the most rigorous philosophical defense of the politics of modernist art to date. Beginning with the debates about art and politics found in the works of Kant, Hegel, and Lukács, the course will move on to consider Benjamin and Adorno’s writings on historicism, allegory, and autonomous art, while paying careful attention to their analyses of such individual artists as Kafka, Brecht, and Beckett. We will spend a great deal of time working through the much-discussed Adorno-Benjamin debate surrounding Mass/Popular Culture and the possibility of revolutionary art and to related essays by other Frankfurt School writers such as Herbert Marcusé and Friedrich Pollock . At the most basic level, when read together Adorno and Benjamin ask whether or not art can have any real critical impact on society, whether mass culture is democratizing or totalitarian, and whether modernist experiments with form succeeded in changing the ways in which we perceive the Other and the world. Readings will include: Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful,” Hegel’s “The End of Art,” Georg Lukács’s “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and selections from Theory of the Novel; Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations along with selected pieces from Reflections, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and The Arcades Project; Theodor W. Adorno’s The Culture Industry, along with selections from Dialectic of Enlightenment, Prisms, Notes to Literature, and Aesthetic Theory; Franz Kafka’s The Castle, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, and essays by Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Marcusé, Martin Jay, Frederic Jameson, and Susan Buck-Morss. English 482 E TOPICS IN RESEARCH, INQUIRY AND WRITING STUDIES, Hawhee. W 1-2:50 - Same as C & I 465 FRENCH 478 / CLIT 478 / WS 490. – Lawrence Schehr -Seminar in Twentieth-Century Literature. Topic: Post-Modern Sexualities: from Lust to Lucky Pierre. A critical examination of the articulation of sexualities in literature and film in post_modern western culture. The course will consider the ways in which contemporary writing and cinema represent current understanding of a multiplicity of sexual categories and participate in the subversion of older, stable, bivalent models. Readings include Virginie Despentes, Michel Houellebecq, Bret Easton Ellis, Elfriede Jelinek, Guillaume Dustan, Verena Stefan, Catherine Millet, Mark Ravenhill, Dennis Cooper, J.G. Ballard, A.M. Homes, Robert Coover, Michael Nava. Tuesday 3-4:50. 1024 FLB. History 487B PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1815 (Roediger) History 487C PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY SINCE 1815 (Reagan) History 490A HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY (Oberdeck) History 492C PROBLEMS IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY (Todorova) History 492D PROBLEMS IN COMPARATIVE HISTORY (B. Edwards) Landscape Architecture 490 (call # 04336) RACE AND SPACE: CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES/CONSTRUCTING PLACE - Professor Dianne Harris -Thursdays, 10:00 – 12:00 This seminar will examine the relationship between the social construction of race and the construction of the built environment (architecture, urban space, landscapes), focusing primarily on the United States. Themes for examination will include:
Participants in the course will be required to attend the symposium “Constructing Race: The Built Environment, Minoritization, and Racism in the United States” which will be held on March 5-6, 2004. The symposium is being organized by Professor Harris and sponsored by the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society , the Department of Landscape Architecture, and the College of Fine and Applied Arts. Philosophy 312/412: Classical Modern Philosophers Philosophy 401 - Seminar in the History of Philosophy - Philosophical Anthropology - Schacht In this seminar we will look at some of the writings of a number of philosophers associated with the movement in early 20th-century Central European philosophy known as “philosophical anthropology” (philosophische Anthropologie). This movement emerged in rivalry with phenomenology and existential philosophy in the period between the two world wars, and may be conceived as a direct descendent of the naturalistically-minded post-religious and post-metaphysical reinterpretation of human reality in the tradition of Hume, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Dilthey. We will focus primarily on the two most important and influential figures in the emergence of this movement, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, and may also give some attention to the later Sartre (Search for a Method), Ernst Cassirer (An Essay on Man), and some related writings of Susanne Langer and Marjorie Grene, and Charles Taylor. Since English versions of most of the material we will be considering are either out of print or very expensive, readings will probably be assembled in a large course pack. Meets Tuesdays, 3.00-5.30pm, 336 Lincoln Hall It is envisaged that papers discussed in the seminar will form the basis for an edited volume. It may be possible to bring in outside speakers during the course of the semester or for a workshop to be held at the semester’s end. SPAN 442. Urban Desires: Sex and the City in Caribbean Cultures. Speech Communication 438: Rhetorics of Globalization & Empire Tuesdays from 5-8 PM, with Professor Stephen Hartnett Many observers have argued that 9/11 triggered a shift in world politics from a course of law-drien economic globalization to a course of weapons-driven empire building. Indeed, conflating Afghanistan, Iraq, and a host of other “rogue states” and terrorists into one catch-all “axis of evil,” President Bush has proposed that the U.S. forego entangling alliances and instead strike where and when it chooses in the name of self defense. In the September 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States (NSSUS), the text articulating “the Bush doctrine,” President Bush warns that “we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self-defense by acting preemptively.” While enacting this new policy of unilateral military adventurism in the name of self defense, the Bush administration has also pursued multilateral economic globalization. Claiming that globalizing free markets inevitably produce economic opportunity, political reform, and judicial fairness, the president has portrayed unfettered capitalism as the only model for continued world development. In fact, the NSSUS’s opening sentence proclaims that all history points to the triumph of “freedom, democracy, and free enterprise,” while its closing sentence proclaims that the future security of the U.S. “comes from” the nation’s “entrepreneurial energy.” The “Bush Doctrine” therefore begins and ends with the understanding that democracy is capitalism and that capitalism is democracy. We will accordingly spend the semester studying the relationships among markets and militaries, trade deals and terrorist strikes, public speeches and secret dealings, force and forgiveness, and democracy and deception. While drawing from economists, political scientists, sociologists, reporters, philosophers, and historians, we will also focus each week on seminal speeches, thus tracking the ways globalization and empire are debated in public. Course Materials: The first half of the semester’s readings will establish a common base of knowledge, while the second half of the semester’s readings will be chosen by students. To fathom the complexities of globalization we will read Ellen Meiskins Wood, Empire of Capital (Verso, 2003); Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (Norton, 2003); and Amy Chua, World on Fire (Anchor, 2004). To grasp the consequences of empire we will read Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (Owl, 2003); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003), President Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, and State Department, CIA, and Congressional Briefs. To track the status of public speaking about these topics we will examine President Bush’s post-9/11 speeches (at www.whitehouse.gov) and the responses to them from 50 Years is Enough (www.50years.org), CorpWatch (www.corpwatch.org), the Independent Media Center (www.indymedia.org), and others. To think about the role of culture in the face of globalization and empire we will read Seyla Benhabib’s The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, 2002). To understand the ways violence and forgiveness circulate throughout these topics, we will read Priscilla Hayner’s Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocities (Routledge, 2002). Additionally, each student will be responsible for sharing materials each week from an assigned source, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, UK Guardian, The Nation, Middle East Report, New Left Review, New Political Science, and others. Please Note that everyone is asked to come to the first class having read Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (use the Vintage paperback, ISBN # 067-972-1754)—studying this text will enable us to hit the ground running. Also please see the harrowing film, Dirty Pretty Things, and listen closely to Bruce Cockburn’s stunning new CD, You’ve Never Seen Everything—these two instances of artistic brilliance will help us think about the implications of globalization and empire. |