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CS92PROD
Future Visions: Temporality and the Politics of Change

CHUM 329
Fall 2012
Section: 01  
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.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS AMST
Course Format: Lecture / DiscussionGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (AMST)
Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available

Last Updated on MAR-28-2024
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