SOCIETY FOR THE HUMANITIES

FALL COURSES 2006

SPRING COURSES 2007

FALL 2006 COURSES

The Society annually awards fellowships for research in the humanities. The fellows offer, in line with their research, informal seminars intended to be exploratory or interdisciplinary. These seminars are open to graduate students, suitably qualified undergraduates, and interested auditors. Students who want credit for a seminar should formally register in their own college. Persons other than those officially enrolled may attend as visitors with permission of the fellow.

COURSE LIST QUICK JUMP
(or you can scroll down the page):
SHUM 404 • Science and Race: A History
SHUM 408 • Global Martial Arts Film & Literature
SHUM 412 • America in the 1970s
SHUM 413 • Noise, Music, Power
SHUM 415 • Post-national Gastroidentities
SHUM 416 • Modern Art and Popular Culture
SHUM 419 • Transnational Method Then and Now:
Historiography, Theory, Practice

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SHUM 404 • Science and Race: A History
(also STS 474)
Fall. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
S. Seth.
M 10:10-12:05.
This course examines the social construction and utilization of scientific conceptions of race in the West. We begin with the existence (or not) of conceptions of biological race in the early-modern period, focusing on early voyages of discovery and so-called Afirst encounters@ between the peoples of the Old and New Worlds. In the second part of the course we will look at enunciations of racial thought in the late 18th century and at the problems of classification that these raised, before examining the roots of AScientific Racism.@ Part three looks at Darwin, Social Darwinism, and eugenics movements in different national contexts, concluding with a study of Nazi science and the subsequent trials of doctors at Nuremberg. The last part of the course examines recent and contemporary applications of racial thinking, including the debate over the origin of AIDS, race and IQ, and the question of whether doctors should make use of race as a category when researching and prescribing new treatments.

Suman Seth is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University.

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SHUM 408 • Global Martial Arts Film & Literature
(also ASIAN 452, COML 408, FILM 408)
Fall. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
P. Liu.
T 10:10-12:05.
Full title: Martial Arts Film and Literature: Globalization from the East
With recent blockbusters such as Kill Bill, Kung Fu Hustle, Hero and The Matrix, a cultural practice from the East called Amartial arts@ has transformed itself from a spiritual and bodily discipline in medieval China into a popular visual spectacle housed in transnational cinema and arcade games. This course studies the Asianization of global postmodern culture by comparing the historical routes, institutional bases, and ideologies of different modes of representing martial arts in film and literature. Our questions will include: the historical origins of martial arts and martial arts cinema; kung fu as a racialized bodily performance; the cult of Bruce Lee; and the relation of martial arts to women, muscles, and the gendering of the body. Please note that mandatory weekly film screenings will be scheduled in addition to the seminar meeting time.

Petrus Liu received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Chinese, Latin, and German) from UC Berkeley. His teaching and research interests focus on Marxian economics, gendered subjectivities in (post-)colonial cultures, 19th- and 20th-century Chinese literary and intellectual thought, and popular culture. He has published in InterAsia Cultural Studies, positions: east asia cultural critique, and Asian Exchange. He is currently editing a special issue of positions on queer China and transnationalism and working on a book manuscript, Stateless Subjects: Chinese Martial Arts Fiction and the Decolonization of Labor.

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SHUM 412 • America in the 1970s
(also AMST 402, HIST 412.01, ILRCB 608)
Fall. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
J. Cowie.
T 2:30-4:25.
This course will investigate the social, cultural, and political history of what is often thought of as the first postmodern decade: the long 1970s. More than the age of bellbottoms, punk, and disco, the seventies sponsored some of the most profound transformations in our sense of citizenship in postwar history. Witness to both the fall of Nixon and the fall of Saigon, the rise of the sunbelt and the decline of the rustbelt, the reification of identity politics and the collapse of class, the death of Elvis and birth of Hip Hop, the triumph of feminism and the politics of resentment, the decade was more than the peculiar aimlessness for which it is remembered. In this class we will explore the major issues of the long seventies in order to understand the seemingly improbable transition of a nation from the tumult of the 1968 to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. We will trace the developments of the era in order to explain the rise of postmodern cultural forms, the coming of postindustrial society, the triumph of neo-conservatism, and the consolidation of a neo-liberal model of political economy. As the prefixes “post” and “neo” suggest, the seventies rested upon a series of disassembled and rebuilt ideas that form the foundation of our own time.

Jefferson Cowie is the author of Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor, and co-editor of Beyond the Ruins: The Meanings of Deindustrialization. During his time at the Society for the Humanities, he will be completing a history of the 1970s called Last Days of the Working -Class: Social History, Politics, and Popular Culture in the 1970s. An Associate Professor at the ILR School, his work focuses on the culture and politics of class in postwar U.S. and comparative history.

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SHUM 413 • Noise, Music, Power
(also ANTHR 414, MUSIC 413)
Fall. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
G. Vargas-Cetina.
W 2:30-4:25.
Music is often contrasted with noise. Where music would be the organized reproduction of sounds, noise is often thought of as chaotic and disturbing. This seminar will bring together different fields of discussion around the musical phenomenon. Post-structural philosophy, post-colonial literature and literary criticism, experimental anthropology, musicology and film will be juxtaposed on the discussion of the musical, from acoustic to electronic beats. Some of the questions articulating the discussion will be: What is the arch-musical in our times? How is music’s dissemination effected? How does music power play out in the production of difference? How are folk musics deterritorialized in contemporary sound? How has technology de/re/constructed the boundaries between music and noise? The title of this seminar makes reference to Jacques Attali’s influential book, Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Attali proposed that power is always behind the ordering of noise into music and the limits of musical enjoyment. The legal upheaval brought about by Puff Daddy’s release of No Way Out in 1997 and Metallica’s lawsuit against Napster in 2000 show us how music can be conceptualized as part of the things and resources subject to ownership rights and commerce laws. The resistance movements spurred by these events also show there are contesting views as to what music is about and who should have the right to enjoy it. Materials will include works by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and others, readings in musicology and the anthropology of music, as well as music. The music will include works inspired by or making reference to these philosophers’ work, folk and folk-based music from around the world and live performances by seminar participants.

Gabriela Vargas-Cetina is Professor of Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Yucatan. She has published articles and book chapters on cooperation and cooperatives in Sardinia (Italy), Chiapas and Yucatan (Mexico); on the Powwow dance circuit in Alberta (Canada); and on urban music in Chiapas and Yucatan. Her current research focuses on urban music in Merida, Mexico.

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SHUM 415 • Post-national Gastroidentities
(also ANTHR 416)
Fall. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
S. Ayora-Diaz.
R 10:10-12:05.
This seminar will examine the Nation-State’s attempts to govern and the citizens’ efforts to affirm the multiplicity of identities within the context of an expanding global, (post)modern, postcolonial, and post-national world. Participants will start by discussing the mechanisms whereby the State seeks to impose its power over citizens, impressing upon them a monolithic national identity and then, move to examine the fracturing effects of the global postmodern, multicultural politics that promotes the affirmation of local and regional identities, the displacement of people within the State, and international immigration as they contribute to explode national identities. In particular, we will attempt to answer the question of how food, cuisine, and gastronomy play an important part both in the strategies to instrument normalcy through the imagination of the modern Nation-State, and the ways in which discourses affirming nation, race, ethnicity, hospitality, the universality of humanity, interact with each other fragmenting the national gastronomic field and undermining the unpolluted self-understanding of the modern Nation-State. The seminar will include discussion of the writings of Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Bhabha, Spivak, and others. It will encourage the discussion of cases from diverse nation-states to review the multiplicity of (trans)local and regional strategies that make recourse of gastronomic traditions to engage with, reject or negotiate with other groups in the context of new forms of cultural colonialism. The seminar will also encourage the discussion of the consequences of identity politics through food.

Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz is Professor of Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Yucatan. He has conducted ethnographic research among mountain shepherds in Sardinia, Italy; among local healers in Chiapas, Mexico; and, currently, on Yucatan’s culinary tradition and the politics of identity. He has published papers and book chapters on Sardinian cultural and sociopolitical practices, on the politics of recognition and representation of local healers in Chiapas, and on the politics of representation of Yucatecan cuisine. He published a book, in Spanish, on Chiapas’ local healers: Globalization, Knowledge and Power: Local Medicines’ Struggle for Recognition, 2002, and co-edited with Gabriela Vargas-Cetina the book Local Modernities: The Ethnography of the Multiple Present (2005), also in Spanish.

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SHUM 416 • Modern Art and Popular Culture
(also ARTH 469, VISST 417)
Fall. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
S. Evans.
R 12:20-2:15.
This course will examine a range of art-historical approaches to the relationship between high art and popular culture from the 19th century to now, covering work by Courbet, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Duchamp, Rodchenko, Rauschenberg, Johns, Sherman, Tiravanija and the artists who have worked with Annlee, an anime character purchased from a cartoon mill. Focusing not just on the social history of art but on the social contexts in which art is produced and received, we will also look at artists’ associations and artists’ spaces, including the cabaret-loving satirists of the Société des Artistes Incohérents and Collaborative Projects, Inc., which installed their Times Square Show in an abandoned massage parlor. Emphasizing music-hall performance and concerts as artistic forums that are also expressly social, we will discuss Dada’s origins in cabaret, Fluxus “compositions” by LaMonte Young and George Brecht, the Merry Pranksters’ wired environments, Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the New York punk scene as a catalyst for Appropriation art. While we will read pertinent critiques—by Benjamin, Adorno, Greenberg, and others—of the confluence of high and low cultures, we will also take seriously the persistence and the success of border crossings and attempt to develop an art-historical method sensitive to the phenomena that the high-low relationship foregrounds. Among these phenomena, we will focus on specific sensibilities (like camp), on the culture of bohemia and the sociological model of the artist subculture, and on artmaking as a sociable activity.

Sarah Evans holds a Ph.D. in art history from UC Berkeley, where she wrote a dissertation that revises the standard theoretical reading of Cindy Sherman by focusing on the social contexts in which she and peers such as Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine produced their earliest work. She works on the history of photography, specifically in its guise as a women’s medium, and on theories of modernism and the avant-garde.

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SHUM 419 • Transnational Method Then and Now:
Historiography, Theory, Practice
(also AS&RC 419)
Fall. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
M. Seigel.
R 2:30-4:25.
This course will explore contemporary transnational scholarship and some of its possible antecedents, both acknowledged and implicit. Its premise is that the popularity of transnational method encourages amnesiac engagements, often erasing the genealogy of less visible schools or sorts of transborder thinking. We will attempt to discern the contours of transnationalism avant la lettre—thinkers pursuing a global vision from a variety of disciplines and political positions over the past three hundred years. The course focuses mostly in the Americas due to the instructor’s focus, so such thinkers include Latin American anti-imperialists, Jesuits and Jansenists, early Afro-diasporic historians, Marxists, pan-Americanists, Boltonites, anti-colonial scholars active in the 1930s such as Fanon, C. L. R. James, Eric Williams, and W. E. B. Du Bois, early Chicano Studies scholars such as Américo Paredes, world systems theorists, neoliberal practitioners of globalization studies, postwar third world women of color and their heirs in poststructuralist feminist theory such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Elsa Barkley Brown, and then recent scholarship claiming the transnational mantle, including work by Nestor Garcia-Canclini, Michael Denning, Brent Edwards, Martha Hodes, Neil Smith, and the instructor. With these current and prior transnational studies as guides, we will explore the parameters of transnational method and consider whether the various approaches grouped under its rubric—comparison, migration studies, Diaspora Studies, globalization theory, etc.—deserve or distort the legacy our historiography will uncover. Students will read course materials and participate in seminar discussions, offer in-class presentations, and write critical historiographic essays or multi-work book reviews. In addition, undergraduates will propose a substantive research project in any field of transnational study; graduate students will write a 15-20 page research paper on the transnational topic of their choice.

Micol Seigel (Ph. D. NYU American Studies, 2001) writes about race in the Americas, particularly the U.S. and Brazil. She is completing a book entitled Trading Race: Racial Construction in the Americas, to be published by Duke University Press in 2007, and is at work on a new project on the relationship between Cold War anticommunism in Latin America and the rise of mass incarceration in the U.S

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SPRING 2007 COURSES

The Society annually awards fellowships for research in the humanities. The fellows offer, in line with their research, informal seminars intended to be exploratory or interdisciplinary. These seminars are open to graduate students, suitably qualified undergraduates, and interested auditors. Students who want credit for a seminar should formally register in their own college. Persons other than those officially enrolled may attend as visitors with permission of the fellow.

COURSE LIST QUICK JUMP
(or you can scroll down the page):
SHUM 420 Culture, Sovereignty, the State
SHUM 421 Modernization and Fiction
SHUM 423 Caribbean Popular Literature
SHUM 424 Time and the Other
SHUM 425 Cold War Aesthetics in E. Asia
SHUM 426 Science, Technology and Colonialism
SHUM 428 The State and its Rivals, 1500-1800

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SHUM 420 Culture, Sovereignty, the State
(also COML 442 and ENGL 408.03)
Spring. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
M. Hart.
R 12:20-2:15.
"Culture, Sovereignty, the State" asks students to think about the relation between 20th- and 21st-century cultural practice and the idea of the state. We will read texts from cultural and political theory, considering their insights in relation to a number of literary and fine art works. Covering a variety of approaches to the state—from theories of absolutist monarchy, to "neoliberal governmentality," to the "culture and society" tradition of the British New Left—our weekly discussions will be wide-ranging in focus. They will return, however, to two central questions: Have cultural critics under-theorized the state, as opposed to related concepts like the "imagined nation"? And does the concept of sovereignty (a notion with resonance for theories of subjectivity, authorship, and state power) offer us a way to articulate the relation between cultural practice and the historical and juridical definition of the state?
Theoretical work under discussion will include books or extracts by Jean Bodin, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Matthew Arnold, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Raymond Williams, and Foucault. More recent analyses will come from Agamben, Nancy Fraser, David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Frances Mulhern, and Saskia Sassen. We will read poetry and fiction by David Jones, Alasdair Gray, and David Peace, as well as artistic and architectural practice by Eyal Weizman, Layla Curtis, and the designers of the New York City Memorial Garden to the British victims of 9/11.

Matt Hart is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research and teaching focuses on contemporary British culture, modernism, and critical theory. He is currently working on two book projects: Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Late Modernism and Vernacular Sovereignty and Late Britain, a collection of essays on British politics and culture since 1979.

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SHUM 421 Modernization and Fiction
(also ENGL 408.01)
Spring. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
A. Hoberek.
M 2:30-4:25.
In this course we will consider the relationship between twentieth-century US fiction and the processes of economic, technological, and organizational development known collectively as “modernization,” treating modernization both as a material phenomenon and as an ideology that has furthered the interests of particular economic classes and nations. We will begin with literary responses to the modernization of agriculture in the early twentieth-century United States, exploring the reciprocal relationships between modernization and (1) the gendered nature of farm labor, (2) the construction of the Midwest as a particular region of the US, and (3) the nostalgia for vanishing ways of life typically associated with “local color” fiction. Then we will turn to the South, a region of the US long associated with underdevelopment, and consider the elaboration of a Southern identity grounded in resistance to modernization yet seemingly paradoxically affiliated with the experimental artistic movement known as modernism. We will address the spatialized contrast between Europe and the US central to representations of immigrants as embodying the modernizing impulse, and compare the celebrations of modernization central to the American New Deal and Soviet socialist realism. In the second half of the course we will turn to modernization as something that the US state has promoted in the rest of the world as part of its cold war and post-cold war foreign policies. We will, for instance, read Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, a novel about the coming of American oil companies to what would become Saudi Arabia, alongside W. W. Rostow’s influential social scientific treatise The Stages of Economic Growth, which directly influenced the policies of the Kennedy administration. In the final weeks of the class we will consider how American fiction of the last thirty-five years has responded to US modernization policy and to the anti-globalization movement that has arisen at least partly in conflict with this policy. Students will write a paper incorporating both close reading of a literary work and research into the history of modernization theory and practice; a research report and drafts of the paper will be due throughout the semester.

Andrew Hoberek is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the author of The Twilight of the Middle Class: Post-World War II American Fiction and White-Collar Work. His research focuses on twentieth-century US literature and culture, and he is currently working on a book on American fiction and foreign policy since 1960.

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SHUM 423 Caribbean Popular Literature
(also AS&RC 427, ENGL 408.02)
Spring. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
B. Edmondson.
T 10:10-12:05.
This course will explore, and historicize, both early and contemporary popular, non-canonical Anglophone Caribbean literature as a site of Caribbean middle class cultural production. The literature of the Caribbean has typically been interpreted by critics as a “highbrow”, or elitist, form, produced and consumed by the relatively small middle class. This course seeks to revise our understandings of Caribbean class and cultural mores by examining Caribbean society through its apparently non-serious, or “middlebrow”, literature. Inasmuch as all of the iconic artifacts of Caribbean identity—salsa, carnival, calypso, dancehall—are identified with the Caribbean working class, “popular” in Caribbeanist scholarship is usually synonymous with “poor”. The middle class, viewed as small and culturally rootless, is usually marginalized by cultural critics as a consumer of popular culture, not a producer. The course will challenge this perception by investigating the locally produced Caribbean novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, putting them into conversation with later, mass-produced or internationally disseminated novels. Examined as a whole, these novels suggest an older and more extensive middle class cultural presence in the Caribbean than is typically credited. In particular, we will concentrate on the role of Caribbean women as readers and writers of middlebrow literature. Many of these novels are written in the romance genre, or feature female protagonists, suggesting that women are the intended reading audience. One of the course’s aims is to answer the question, Is there a popular literary tradition in the Caribbean?

Belinda Edmondson is an associate professor of English and African-American & African Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. She is the author of Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative (1999) and editor of Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation (1999), among other publications. Her current research project is on Caribbean middlebrow culture, both past and present.

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SHUM 424 Time and the Other
Spring. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
N. Melas.
T 12:20-2:15.
What is the relation between time and belonging? What are the conditions of inclusion or exclusion into the present? Do all people occupy the same time? What are the presuppositions necessary to determining that something or someone is ahead of the times or behind the times, premature or belated? What are the ramifications of positing multiple temporalities and how do these enter into representation? What is the role of the other (temporal, cultural, historical, spectral, perspectival) in our apprenhension and interpretation of time? This course will address these questions in a wide-ranging investigation of temporality and otherness in a selection of key texts, mainly in philosophy and literature with special attention to the intersection of experience and politics. Authors may include Heraclitus, St Augustine, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Levinas, Fabian, Conrad, Achebe, Glissant, Ouolouguem, Bugul.

Natalie Melas teaches in the Comparative Literature Department at Cornell University. Her areas of interest include transcultural theory (between postcolonialism and globalism), the politics of disciplinary histories, cultural comparison, modern English literature, Anglophone and especially Francophone Caribbean literature and theory, and Greek decadence. She has published essays on the fate of the humanities in the contemporary university, on incommensurability, on Joseph Conrad, on French Caribbean Literature and on modern literature around Alexandria. Her book, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison, is forthcoming with Stanford University Press. Her current project concerns the poetics and politics of untimeliness.

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SHUM 425 Cold War Aesthetics in E. Asia
(also ASIAN 465)
Spring. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
P. Liu.
T 2:30-4:25.
This course is concerned with the Cold War in East AsiaCthe Apartitioning@ of China, Japan, and Korea into mutually hostile, geographically fractured and temporally de-synchronized Azones@ in the post-WWII eraCand how this historical experience produced a postmodern aesthetics in East Asia. How do literary texts, films, and popular music in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan explore this historical trauma and ideological rift? How might we understand postwar popular culture in East Asia as social formations standing in a structural relation to a US-led “new world order,” and how does this form of neo-colonialism differ from previous forms of territorial colonialism? Special attention will be paid to theories of the “East Asian economic miracle” as an exception to capitalist development.

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SHUM 426 Science, Technology and Colonialism
(also STS 476)
Spring. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
S. Seth.
R 10:10-12:05.
Scholarly work in the last two decades has come increasingly to pay attention to the oft-neglected linkages between technology and science on the one hand and the discourses and practices of colonialism and imperialism on the other. Texts of broad conception like Michael Adas= Machines as the Measure of Men and Gyan Prakash=s recent Another Reason have made an attempt to provide an overview of many of the issues involved, but the field awaits a genuinely synthetic treatment. This advanced seminar will aim to provide the framework for such a treatment by looking at a number of key areas of current interest. The course is organized thematically and topics will include the importance to the colonial project of social statistics and technologies of identification (fingerprinting), medicine and hygiene, scientific nationalism and nationalist science, Aguns, phones and steam,@ the periphery as laboratory, and gender, savagery and criminality. We will also draw on some aspects of post-colonial literature, especially the writing of those involved in Subaltern Studies, to take up a question poorly explored in the field so far: the relationship between science and violence. Readings will be comprised of a mixture of primary and secondary sources, and students are encouraged to contribute topics and texts of particular interest.

Suman Seth is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University.

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SHUM 428 The State and its Rivals, 1500-1800
(also HIST 412.02)
Spring. 4 credits. Limited to 15 students.
P. Stern.
R 2:30-4:25.
Full title: Rethinking Leviathan: The State and its Rivals in the Early Modern World.
In an era of globalization, multinationalism, international commerce, and the rise of various forms of “non-state” actors, it is striking that history writing — particularly about politics — continues to be dominated by the centrality of the nation-state. Yet, especially when seen in its wider global and historical contexts, the definition of state and political community that we have become familiar with in the modern world — contiguous, well-defined territory marked by the monopolization of force and bureaucracy — is revealed not as a self-evident fact or inevitable reality but as only one possible figuration of political power. This course offers an opportunity for students to think within and beyond the “nation-state” by investigating its early modern foundations as well as the possible alternative forms of political community rival to it. Drawing on readings from an interdisciplinary literature in history, sociology, political science, anthropology, historical geography, and literary criticism, the course seeks to encourage students to question the primacy of the state in our understanding of history and politics while demanding they think practically about methodologies and strategies for undertaking research that can overcome such historical and historiographical limits. It investigates the historical and theoretical definitions of the state, literature on its rise in early modern Europe, and the other forms of rival political community that vitiated the state’s claims to totalizing sovereignty and allegiance. From the pope to pirates, early modern history is replete with examples of possible rivals to the nation-state as well as evidence for how the modern nation-state came, perhaps temporarily, to overcome them. These include religious authorities, corporations and associations, companies and transnational/global institutions, itinerant military power, composite and non-contiguous states, as well as those increasingly defined as illegitimate by the national state, such as pirates, thieves, and secret societies. These varied forms of power are key to understanding the dynamics of early modern European and world history, as well as the processes that slowly made these alternatives unavailable in modern era. Furthermore, such an understanding allows students to explore the similarities — and significant differences — between the early modern and the postmodern era, including concerns about globalization, multinationalism, diaspora, postcolonialism, and the questionable fate of the nation-state itself.

Philip Stern is Assistant Professor of History at American University in Washington, DC. His principal research and teaching interests include the history of early modern Britain, British Empire, and Mughal and British South Asia. He is currently at work on two book projects: A State in the Disguise of a Merchant: The Origins of the East India Company-State, 1657-1707, and Rescuing the Age: Culture, Cartography, and the British Exploration of Africa 1788-1830.

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