STAGING THE EARLY MOD MEDITERR

BLOOD/LUST: STAGING EARLY MODE

This course examines, in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain and England (1580-1640), how the two countries staged the conflict between them, and with the Ottoman Empire; that is, how both countries represent national and imperial clashes, and the concepts of being “Spanish,” “English,” or “Turk,” as well as the dynamic and fluid identities of North Africa, often played out on the high seas of the Mediterranean with Islam and the Ottoman Empire. We will consider how the Ottoman Empire depicted itself artistically through miniatures and court poetry. The course will include travel and captivity narratives from Spain, England, and the Ottoman Empire.

• W 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Patricia E Grieve
  CULPA: 15 Info
• 4 points

INTRO TO COMP LIT & SOCIETY

Introduction to concepts and methods of comparative literature in cross-disciplinary and global context. Topics may include: oral, print, and visual culture; epic, novel, and nation; literature of travel, exile, and diaspora; sex and gender transformation; the human/inhuman; writing trauma; urban imaginaries; world literature; medical humanities. Open only to students who have applied for and declared a major in Comparative Literature and Society or Medical Humanities.

• T 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• R 10:10 a.m.-noon
• 3 points

Border Crossings Across Languages and Di

border crossings: lang di

In our age of purportedly unsurpassable walls, mobility restrictions, and heightened security, borders are often imagined and understood as physical lines of demarcation protecting state sovereignty and defending cultural specificity. This course seeks to destabilize this notion of a fixed, immovable and potentially sealed border through representations of contemporary border-crossing across various media, in order to show the border, instead, as a concept and device regulating human mobility well beyond its physical location. This course will incorporate literary, visual, and political texts that complicate and expand the imaginary -- spatial, temporal, and poetic -- of the border and border crossings. 

Divided into four parts that underscore the evolution of human interactions with the border from the early 20th Century until the present, this three-credit undergraduate seminar is focused on Europe while including other migratory spaces of the Global North, most notably North America. We will start with a general overview of the border as a concept and a mechanism that simultaneously enables and restricts movement. We will then engage with post-WWI crossings of the borders of the British and French empire as significant historical elements of the creation of the border in relation to discriminated and racialized groups of the 20th Century. Moving on to exploring the formation of the European Union as predicated on a space of free internal circulation opposing a political objective of “zero illegal entries”, we will look at the formation of EU and the US borders as a result of ongoing processes of illegalization. Lastly, we will study the iterations of some of these processes on the High Seas, only in theory a space of free circulation.  
 

 

 

• R 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Tommaso Manfredini
  Info
• 3 points

Transnational Feminisms-China and Beyond

Transntl Feminism-China/B

This is an interdisciplinary seminar for graduate students and advanced undergraduates to explore transnational feminisms, gender politics in China, and the movement of feminist (and anti-feminist) ideas across borders. We will read some translations of primary works by Chinese writers, as well as feminist scholarship in English to gain insight into the following areas: social movements; gender, race, ethnicity and class; global capitalism and inequalities; sexualities; identities; digital activism; nationalisms; marriage and families; and the politics of reproduction. Although the course has no formal prerequisites, it assumes some basic knowledge about Chinese history and intersectional approaches to gender. If you have never taken a course on China before,please ask me for guidance on whether or not the course is suitable for you.

• T 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Leta Hong Fincher
  CULPA: 1 Wikipedia h-index: 6 Info
• 3 points

BASIC CONCEPTS-POST-FREUD THGT

This course examines psychoanalytic movements that are viewed either as post-Freudian in theory or as emerging after Freuds time. The course begins by considering the ways Freuds cultural and historical surround, as well as the wartime diaspora of the European psychoanalytic community, shaped Freudian and post-Freudian thought. It then focuses on significant schools and theories of psychoanalysis that were developed from the mid 20th century to the present. Through readings of key texts and selected case studies, it explores theorists challenges to classical thought and technique, and their reconfigurations, modernizations, and total rejections of central Freudian ideas. The course concludes by looking at contemporary theorists moves to integrate notions of culture, concepts of trauma, and findings from neuroscience and attachment research into the psychoanalytic frame.

• M 2:10 p.m.-4 p.m.
• Instructor: Karen Seeley
  CULPA: 9 Info
• 4 points

Climate and Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has starkly revealed how human health is entwined with environmental factors. In New York City, the ZIP codes that were hit hardest during the deadly first wave of Covid can be mapped using climatological indices, such as heat vulnerability, air quality, and green space proximity. This course will examine how the deep relationship between climate and pandemic might not just be associative, but causal.  Poor air quality directly contributes to the transmission of airborne viruses. Habitat loss and climate-driven shifts in animal migration have led to new zoonotic encounters. Still infectious 30,000-year old “giant viruses” have already been discovered in melting Siberian permafrost. At the psychiatric level, climate anxiety has emerged as a clinical condition. Speculative fictions, past and present, invite us to imagine future climate-driven pandemics.

Through interdisciplinary readings in literature and history, virology and the biomedical sciences, seminar discussions, and a skills-building mapping practicum with community partners at Columbia and a New York City climate non-profit, students will study how climate and pandemic have been interconnected in the past, and together we will produce public-facing collaborative research speculating about how they might interact in the future. This is a 4000-level seminar class open to undergraduate and graduate students in a variety of fields; it counts as a core course in the Medical Humanities major.

• W 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Arden A Hegele
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

Exhaustion and Idleness in Literature an

Exhaustion in lit & medic

“I’m exhausted.”  That refrain has rung out repeatedly during the last two years.  It has been both a cry for help and a rallying cry.  Exhaustion is a state of being characterized by extreme fatigue, torpor and lassitude.  It can be a response to the unbearable weight of personal experience or a more extensive cultural formation.  It is also a medical symptom (eg anemia and heart failure) and a diagnosis in its own right (chronic fatigue syndrome), though one whose status is uncertain.  Exhaustion can be spiritual, intellectual, emotional, sexual, or political.  Whether as medical symptom, disease, individual experience or response to impossible expectations, the feelings and causes of exhaustion dominate our conversations.

Exhaustion is often reframed as idleness, especially under economic systems that prioritize productivity, efficiency and work.  Idleness carries a negative connotation and the exhausted are stigmatized as lazy or unwilling to work.  But idleness itself can be recast as a source of play, freedom and plenitude.  Wool-gathering and day dreaming provide the kernels for creative endeavors and alternate possibilities, while slowdowns and strikes position idleness as a form of resistance to hegemonic and exploitative forces that want to “work us to the bone”.  Far from an indignity, idleness might be the very balm to an exhausted and weary world.          

In this class, we will explore some literary, philosophic and scientific frames for both exhaustion and idleness. We will read novels, plays and short stories by Ottessa Moshfegh, Samuel Beckett and Herman Melville among others as well as illness narratives, case histories, and medical heuristics and theory.

• T 10:10 a.m.-noon
• Instructor: Rishi K Goyal
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

Abolition Medicine: Medical Racisms and

In 1935, WEB Dubois wrote about abolition democracy: an idea based not only on breaking down unjust systems, but on building up new, antiracist social structures. Scholar activists like Angela Davis, Ruth Gilmore and Mariame Kaba have long contended that the abolition of slavery was but one first step in ongoing abolitionist practices dismantling racialized systems of policing, surveillance and incarceration. The possibilities of prison and police abolition have recently come into the mainstream national consciousness during the 2020 resurgence of nationwide Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests. As we collectively imagine what nonpunitive and supportive community reinvestment in employment, education, childcare, mental health, and housing might look like, medicine must be a part of these conversations. Indeed, if racist violence is a public health emergency, and we are trying to bring forth a “public health approach to public safety” – what are medicine’s responsibilities to these social and institutional reinventions?

Medicine has a long and fraught history of racial violence. It was, after all, medicine and pseudoscientific inquiry that helped establish what we know as the racial categorizations of today: ways of separating human beings based on things like skin color and hair texture that were used (and often continue to be used) to justify the enslavement, exclusion, or genocide of one group of people by another. Additionally, the history of the professionalization of U.S. medicine, through the formation of medical schools and professional organizations as well as and the certification of trained physicians, is a history of exclusion, with a solidification of the identity of “physician” around upper middle class white masculinity. Indeed, the 1910 Flexner Report, whose aim was to make consistent training across the country’s medical schools, was explicit in its racism. From practices of eugenic sterilization, to histories of experimentation upon bodies of color, medicine is unfortunately built upon racist, sexist and able-ist practices.

This course is built on the premise that a socially just practice of medicine is a bioethical imperative. Such a practice cannot be achieved, however, without examining medicine’s histories of racism, as well as learning from and building upon histories of anti-racist health practice. The first half of the semester will be dedicated to learning about histories of medical racism: from eugenics and racist experiment

• R 12:10 p.m.-2 p.m.
• Instructor: Sayantani T Dasgupta
  CULPA: 2 Info
• 3 points

Matters of Life/Death

The imbricated crises of a global pandemic and the legacies of structural anti-Black racism necessitate reflection, at once political and philosophic. One might argue that they reframe twentieth century French traditions of thought as a sustained critical reflection on
le vivant
(life); the way society classifies and treats its dead, its “living dead” or excluded members; the political economy of death and life management; death sentences (both legal and literary.) In the twenty first century, Black feminist thought addresses the ecological catastrophe of the pandemic and the resultant unequal distribution of life and death, pressuring what is at stake under the philosopheme of the “human.”

This seminar is structured as a conversation between representative thinkers from each “tradition.” Yet neither tradition has discrete borders; twenty first century thinkers inherit from their French predecessors even as they contest and bring to light fraught presuppositions. We might also say, with Jacques Derrida, that the twentieth century French thinkers -Bergson, Canguilhem, Deleuze, Foucault- inherit from the future- from Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Octavia Butler, Fred Moten. How might this urgent reframing and conversation enable a critical resistance?

• R 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Diane Rubenstein
  Info
• 3 points

Possession: On Losing Ourselves

Possession:On Losing Ours

The contemporary world is arguably characterized by relations of property, ownership, and dispossession. Modernity, capitalism, colonialism, and decolonization are intertwined. In this upper-level seminar, we interrogate the connections between personhood and possession in modern Europe and former European colonies. We examine theories, philosophies, and works of literature that establish, represent, challenge, or critique the various meanings and embodiments of possession and dispossession in modern societies. With authors including Rainer Maria Rilke, Èdouard Glissant, Ghassan Kanafani, Yuri Herrera, and Clarice Lispector as our companions, we chart an itinerary among possessive and dispossessive paradigms of subjectivity from Hegel and Proudhon to Fanon and Butler, with the aim of fathoming anew older and more recent alternatives to possession.

• M 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• Instructor: Margaret W Scarborough
  Info
• 3 points

Art, Aesthetics and the Itineraries of M

Art Aesthetic Modern Mini

This mini seminar asks how we might approach the Mughal miniature today through new practices of experiment and innovation while bearing in mind the material history, and the infrastructural contexts of training and apprenticeship through which South Asian art and aesthetics has typically approached the study of this form. Art making as embodied labor, questions about the archive and its availability for creative repurposing, and the relationship between the artwork and museum will be explored. Critical practices of deconstructing the visual archive as well as discussions about the materiality of art practice will orient discussions about contemporary South Asian art as a conversation between “traditional” forms, and experimental methods.

 

Pioneering Pakistani American artist, Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting pre-modern and classical Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. By bringing the non-western art-historical visual vernacular into dialogue with contemporary international art practices, Sikander’s multivalent work examines colonial archives to readdress orientalist narratives in western art history.  Recipient of the MacArthur genius grant and US Medal of Art, Sikander's work has been exhibited and collected internationally.  Her exhibition 'Extraordinary Realities' was on view at the Morgan Library NY, RISD Museum and the MFA Houston from 2021- 2022.  A newly commissioned public art- work for Madison Square Park will open in NYC in Jan 2023.

 

The artist will discuss her own art practice through a focus on formal elements of the miniature tradition as these have been adapted to the requirements of diverse media and viewing publics. Seminar discussion will draw on the artist’s personal archive of slides and other visual material.

• M 6:10 p.m.-8 p.m.
• Instructor: Shahzia Sikander
  Info
• 0.5 points

INTRO TO COMP LIT & SOC-GRAD

Please note: This course is required for ICLS graduate students, and priority will be given to these students. Generally the course fills with ICLS students each semester. Students MAY NOT register themselves for this course. Contact the ICLS office for more information at icls.columbia@gmail.com. This course was formerly numbered as G4900. This course introduces beginning graduate students to the changing conceptions in the comparative study of literatures and societies, paying special attention to the range of interdisciplinary methods in comparative scholarship. Students are expected to have preliminary familiarity with the discipline in which they wish to do their doctoral work. Our objective is to broaden the theoretical foundation of comparative studies to negotiate a conversation between literary studies and social sciences. Weekly readings are devoted to intellectual inquiries that demonstrate strategies of research, analysis, and argumentation from a multiplicity of disciplines and fields, such as anthropology, history, literary criticism, architecture, political theory, philosophy, art history, and media studies. Whenever possible, we will invite faculty from the above disciplines and fields to visit our class and share their perspectives on assigned readings. Students are encouraged to take advantage of these opportunities and explore fields and disciplines outside their primary focus of study and specific discipline.

• W 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
• 4 points