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(ENL 291) -  Mina Karavanta

Περιγραφή Μαθήματος

Department of English, Division of Literature and Culture

Instructor: Mina Karavanta, Associate Professor

e-mail: akarav@enl.uoa.gr

http://scholar.uoa.gr/akarav/home

Editor, Synthesis: An Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/synthesis

Office Hours: Wednesday 15:15-16:30 & Thursday by appointment

Office Number: 703 (7th Floor, First Door on the Right)

Office Phone number: 210 7277776

Theory of Culture (5th Semester)

Wednesday 12:00-15:00

Amphitheater 434

COURSE DESCRIPTION Theory of Culture invites students to critically examine the ways by which contemporary philosophical and theoretical discourses have challenged the representation of western culture as the epitome of all cultures. The course opens with a critical exegesis of the Black Atlantic as the thick network of colonial modernity, which is consolidated on board of the slave ships and on the slave plantations that sprawl across the Caribbean islands and the Americas (Course Unit 1). 

Reading the Black Atlantic as a transmodern site (Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo) challenges our understanding of modernity as a European phenomenon. The Black (and Brown) Atlantic invites to think of colonial modernity as the site of “overlapping territories and intertwined histories” (Edward Said), where new connections, relations, and affiliations between oppositional and different cultures arise often as a result of colonial and imperial violence (Course Unit 2).

Having crossed the Atlantic to the American shores on board of the slave ship Zong, while listening to the woes of slaves and admiring the strength of Imoinda and Caliban to resist their colonisers and survive to claim the future (Course Units 1 &2), we will examine the political and social phenomenon of American Exceptionalism through two historical events that transformed the US culture and had a global impact on world politics and cultural relations, namely, the Vietnam War and the War on Terror (Course Unit 3). 

In the wake of neo-imperialism and a new regime of biopolitics that is triggered by the state of emergency that followed the 9/11 and other terrorist attacks, we will question the ways cultures are affected by the neoliberal order in the present age. Why do neo-nationalist and neo-racist movements continue to develop despite the past and present histories of the disaster of the human? 

Haunted by Walter Benjamin’s Thesis VII, ”There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” we will ask this question throughout our course (Course Unit 4). We will end with a discussion about decolonial politics and transmodern places and temporalities in the present (Course Unit 5). 

Requirements

Students of this elective course are expected to attend regularly, participate in the class sessions, give short oral presentations and complete three in class writing assignments (one hour long at the end of the class). More specifically, students will be evaluated according to the following options:

Option 1

1^st in class Writing Assignment: 20%

2^nd in class Writing Assignment: 20%

Final Exam: 60%

Portfolio Exercises (to be assigned in class; submission deadline: to be announced in class), Presentation (to be assigned by the instructor) and Participation: 20%. (extra points)

NOTE: Students are responsible for attending the course regularly. There will be no makeup arrangements for students who miss the in class writing assignments.

Option 2

Final Exam: 100%

Course Unit 1: The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity: Shipwrecks, Ruins and the Archive of Silences and Specters

(Weeks 1-5: October 9-23)

 

Week 1, Wed. October 9

& Friday October 11 (make up class, 9-12, 426)

Required Reading

1. Paul Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity” & “‘Not a Story to Pass On’: Living Memory and the Slave Sublime” from The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double ConsciousnessShip (see e-class document “TheBlack Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity”) (Reading Assignment for October 9 and October 11)
2. Sylvia Wynter, "1492" (Reading Assignment for October 16)
3. Overview and In Class Writing Assignment, October 23

Art: J.M.W Turner’s “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying: Typhoon Coming On” (October 9 and October 11)

Literary Texts

1. NourbeSe Philip’sZong(e-class document) (Reading Assignment for October 16)

Black Libretto (selections): Joan Anim-Addo's Imoinda or She Who Will Loose Her Name (e-class document) (Reading Assignment for October 9)

Recommended Reading (Secondary Sources): 

Joan Anim-Addo, “Translational Space and Creolising Aesthetics in Three Women’s Novels: the Radical Diasporic (Re)turn” 

Mina Karavanta, “Into the Interior of Cultural Affiliations: Joan Anim Addo’s Imoinda and the Creolization of Modernity”

Giovanna Covi, “Creolizing Cultures and Kinship: Then and There,Now and Here|

Mina Karavanta, "Injunctions of the Specter of Slavery"

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra (Read Introduction and Chapter 1)

 

 Course Unit 2: Culture and Imperialism

(Weeks 6-8: October 30-November 6)

Required Reading

1. Edward Said, “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories” (see e-class document) (November 6)
2. Frantz Fanon, “On Violence” (from The Wretched of the Earth); Homi Bhabha, “Introduction to Frantz Fanon’sThe Wretched of the Earth” (from The Wretched of the Earth) (Reading Assignment for November 6)

Literary texts

Aimé Césaire, The Tempest & William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Reading Assignment for November 6)

Recommended Reading  

Paget Henry, Linda Alcoff, “Caliban as Philosopher: An Interview with Paget Henry”

Todd Andrew Borlik, “Caliban and the fen demons of Lincolnshire” 

Enrique Dussel, “Ethics Is the Original Philosophy; or, The Barbarian Words Coming from the Third World: An Interview with Enrique Dussel"

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

 

Course Unit 3: American Imperialism & American Exceptionalism

(Weeks 9-10: November 20-27)

Required Reading

1. Donald E. Pease, “Introduction: The United States of Fantasy” & “Antigone’s Kin: From Abu Ghraib to Barack Obama” (inThe New American Exceptionalism) (Reading Assignment for November 13)
2. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides” fromPhilosophy in a Time of Terror (Reading Assignment for November 20)
3. Overview and Writing Exercise, December 4. MAterial to Study for the Exercise: Course unit 3, Pease and Derrida. 

Recommended Reading

Amy Kaplan & Donald Pease, Cultures of the United States Imperialism 

Inderpal Grewal, “Transnational America: Race and Gender after 9/11” (in Transnational America)

Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others"

Recommended Films F.F. Coppola :Apocalypse Now & Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras: Hiroshima Mon Amour

 

Course Unit 4: Globalization, Nationalism, Migration and the World We Live I

(Weeks 11-12: December 4, December 11)

Required Reading 

1. Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak,Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. Pages: 58-84. (Reading Assignment for December 4)
2. Étienne Balibar, “For A Democracy without Exclusion” (inEqualiberty): pages “What are the Excluded  excluded from?”199-207, and “Uprisings in the Banlieues” 231-258. (Reading Assignment for December 11)
3. Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" (Reading Assignment for December 4)

Recommended Reading

Pheng Cheah & Suzan Guerlac, Derrida and the Time of the Political

Étienne Balibar,  “Is There Neo-Racism?”

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Recommended Film Athena, Roman Gavras

 

Course Unit 5: Transmodernity and the Decolonial For

(Week 13: December 18)

Required Reading

1. Catherine Walsh, "The Decolonial For" (from On Decoloniality, Walter Mignolo & Catherine Walsh) (Reading Assignment for December 13)
2. Walter Mignolo, "What does it mean to decolonize?" (from On Decoloniality) (Reading Assignment for December 20)
3. Recommended film: Ciro Guerra, TheEmbrace of the Serpent

Recommended Reading 

1. Walter Mignolo, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations
2. Mabel Morana (Ed.), Coloniality at Large

Ημερομηνία δημιουργίας

Τρίτη 29 Οκτωβρίου 2019