Future Visions: Temporality and the Politics of Change
CHUM 329
Fall 2012
| Section:
01
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| Crosslisting:
ENGL 381, AMST 342, ANTH 305 |
| Certificates: Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory |
What is the time of political change? This course will explore alternative temporal frameworks embraced by artists, writers, social activists, and interdisciplinary scholars from diverse social and cultural locations. We ask, How do concepts of temporality help us understand, resist, contest, and transform prevailing social orders?
We will begin by assembling some conceptual tools for understanding the relationship of time to historical change and to racial, cultural, and national difference. Drawing on psychoanalysis, literary theory, history, trauma studies, African American studies, and postcolonial studies, we will explore the telos of modernity and narratives of liberal progress, along with the possibilities for memory and memorialization to work against historical forgetting and cultural amnesia. We will then consider some of the critical and oppositional possibilities of being out of sync with dominant temporal frameworks, as they have been articulated in scholarship on alternative modernities and in anthropology, sociology, feminist theory, and queer theory. We will ask, Are there other, perhaps more livable, temporalities? Finally, we will turn to the question of the future as found in meditations on utopias and dystopias; in political, cultural, and ecological justice movements; in ideologies of newness; and in rhetorics of failure and apocalypse. As we consider social change, revolutions, and new "ends" and beginnings, students will have the opportunity to learn from current social justice movements. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS AMST |
| Course Format: Lecture / Discussion | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
Final list of course texts will be available at Broad Street Books.
Potential titles include:
Lauren Berlant, CRUEL OPTIMISM
Cathy Caruth, UNCLAIMED EXPERIENCE: TRAUMA, NARRATIVE, HISTORY
Anne Cheng, THE MELANCHOLY OF RACE: PSYCHOANALYSIS, ASSIMILATION, AND HIDDEN GRIEF
Lee Edelman, NO FUTURE: QUEER THEORY AND THE DEATH DRIVE
Kim Fortun, ADVOCACY AFTER BHOPAL: ENVIRONMENTALISM, DISASTER, NEW GLOBAL ORDERS
Elizabeth Freeman, TIME BINDS: QUEER TEMPORALITIES, QUEER HISTORIES
Deborah B. Gould, MOVING POLITICS: EMOTION AND ACT UP'S FIGHT AGAINST AIDS
Judith Halberstam, THE QUEER ART OF FAILURE
Elizabeth Povinelli, ECONOMIES OF ABANDONMENT: SOCIAL BELONGING AND ENDURANCE IN LATE LIBERALISM
Diana Taylor, THE ARCHIVE AND THE REPERTOIRE: PERFORMING CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE AMERICAS
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Examinations and Assignments:
Assignments will include several short papers, a class presentation, and a final paper/project. |
Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
Class includes one large lecture and one smaller discussion section each week. Students will also attend several public lectures on the theme "Temporality: Stasis, Repetition, Transformation" at the Center for the Humanities on Mondays at 4:30p.m. |
| Instructor(s): Weiss,Margot Tang,Amy Cynthia Times: .M.W... 01:10PM-02:30PM; Location: FISK210; |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 50 | | SR major: 15 | JR major: 15 | | |
| Seats Available: 22 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 10 | JR non-major: 10 | SO: 0 | FR: X |
| Web Resources: Syllabus |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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