Spring 2023

Core Courses

The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis core course requirements.

English 203 (Critical Theory 240)
Decolonizing History, Narrative, and Event

Donna Jones
Thursdays 2-5 pm /305 Wheeler
Class #: 23861

This class will examine the question of history and the conceptualization of the modern in postcolonial literature and theory. It is only at death when the possibility of future action for an individual is foreclosed, that we are able to begin to give final significance to what he has done in life. After the implosion of the West in the Great War, colonial intellectuals concluded that the history of the West could be finally written because it had come to an end not in the eternal present of Hegelian triumph but in suicidal despair, not in spite of but because of the very achievements of the Hegelian Geist. The key moments in Hegel’s triumphant narrative of the Geist in its advance to the Prussian state were also re-evaluated, and different aspects of the past became important. Once explored at the margins of European literature in the period of pan-European pacifism, colonial violence, for example, proved itself altogether more fateful. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, reason itself was revealed to be based on the partial assumptions of the technologist who aimed to master, control and use matter. Also coming under scrutiny was the dialectical theory of history, which implied that past gains are preserved in the higher stages so that no progress is lost and progress is cumulative. Anything worth preserving is sublated. The crisis of the West then led to a revaluation of what had to be negatively dismissed because it had not been preserved, and intensive study of what had been ignored or stood outside the march of progress. The texts chosen for this course are both the classic articulations of the Western narratives of progress and postcolonial works which place the mechanics of progress under rigorous scrutiny.

English 250 (Critical Theory 240)
Anticolonialism as Theory

Poulomi Saha
Thursdays 11 am-2 pm / 337 Wheeler
Class #: 32809

Anticolonialism, as historical process and political philosophy, concerns itself with the quest for liberation. This course centers anticolonialism as a vital resource for the rethinking of past, present, and future visions of the end of empire. We will understand anticolonialism in a temporally and geographically expansive sense and that the “post” of postcolonialism does not mean “past.” Postcolonial critique is a comparative project, inclusive of the literature and culture of former European colonies, alongside insurgent minority forms from across the globe, and claims of Indigenous peoples to cultural and territorial sovereignty. We will engage promiscuous, speculative, and recombinant work from the humanities and social sciences that proposes a fresh understanding of the field of postcolonial studies, its legacies, and its futures. The uncertain present of endless war, converging catastrophes, and worsening global inequality reveals the exigency and relevance of postcolonial studies and, at the same time, demands new modes of critical theory. For this reason, the course will engage theoretical readings on race, empire, political possibility from the canon of postcolonial studies and critical theory and expand its range to include contemporary scholarship. The course will be structured colloquium-style, with each week organized around a visit by a scholar whose work was presented at the recent “Anticolonialism as Theory” symposium from a range of disciplines and theoretical orientations including literary studies, anthropology, political science, history, and gender studies.

Rhetoric 240G (Critical Theory 240)
Contemporary Black Thought

Fumi Okiji
Tuesday 3:30-6:30 pm / 7415 Dwinelle
Class #: 10048

This seminar considers contemporary black thought as a substantial critique of Western modernity, and as a source of social and epistemological alternative. Central to our discussions will be the field’s ontological turn, approached by way of a number of thinkers—Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Fred Moten, and Nahum Chandler, among them. We will also trace key ideas currently circulating in black critical thought back to forerunners such as Hortense Spillers, Cedric Robinson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Our enquiries will devote time to specifically rhetorical and aesthetic responses to the challenges that these contemporary renderings of blackness pose.

Spanish 280 (Critical Theory 240)
Sense Making & Thought from the Global South

Natalia Brizuela
Wednesdays 3-6 pm / 204 Dwinelle
Class #: 19768

This seminar will explore practices of sense-making from the Global South, with a particular focus on Latin America & the Caribbean. Sense-making is the entangled exercise of critical sensing and critical thought that is not founded on the Western logo-centric practice of reason, but rather on an embodied, relational and cosmological sentir-pensar (Escobar). Our current planetary crisis -at ecological, political, economic, and subjective scales- has pushed practitioners of numerous Western disciplines to rethink the contours of their fields, while sites of modern Western knowledge production more broadly have begun to recognize the fault lines of logocentric, instrumental reason. The seminar will address our cosmopolitical present through the study of critical interventions built through forms of expression not anchored exclusively on the Western understanding of reason, as we learn with and through images, performances, singing and texts as different but equal forms of sense-making, that other worlds, of entanglement and solidarity, exist and are possible. We will engage the work of Caístulo, Gustavo Caboco, Paz Encina, Arturo Escobar, Malcom Ferdinand, Ana Gallardo, Verónica Gago, Lorgia García-Peña, Ailton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa, Las Nietas del Nonó, Francia Marquez, Beatriz Nascimento, Grace Passo, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Rita Segato, Maboula Soumahoro, Denetem Touam Bona, Sylvia Wynter, Dani Zelko.

Core classes (Critical Theory 200, 205 and 240) may also be taken for elective credit

Elective Courses

The following courses satisfy Critical Theory Designated Emphasis elective requirements.

Anthropology 250A (Critical Theory 290) Voices in the Other Scene: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Mediumship, and Aesthetic
Experience

Stefania Pandolfo
Mondays 9 am – 12 pm / 201 Anthro/Art Practice Building 201
Class #: 33297

The repeated lockdowns and the isolation they produced, the experience of death unmourned, and the processes of dispossession, racialization, and surveillance, have been associated during the pandemic with expanding forms of mental pain that echo other histories of collective trauma. Through a reflection on madness and psychic life, dreaming, mediumship and spiritual cures, as well as on the rise of digital subjectivity and its malaise, in this seminar we will explore the capacity of aesthetic processes to enable spaces of healing, for persons and collectivities, in the confrontation with trauma and loss, and in the experience of mental pain. In turn, we will reflect on the way aesthetic forms (whether in the plastic arts, in poetry, literature, or music) in their inception have a close relationship with the primary affects and the experience of trauma itself.

Anthropology 250X-002 (Critical Theory 290)
The Enigma of Authority

Daena Funahashi
Wednesdays 10 am-12 pm / 192 Social Sciences Building
Class #: 31206

What grounds authority? The notion of authority – whether it be epistemological, scientific, political, religious, or divine – is in some ways linked to questions of power, specifically, the power to author and to authorize. But on what basis do we give this power credit? Authoritative projects have power based upon their capacities to move people without moving, to act upon the individual without acting. How then could we locate and examine this force? What is it that moves us? In this seminar, we build upon classic texts in anthropology on mana, fetish, and political theology to explore how our submission to the authoritative voice takes place at a level beyond reason.

Anthropology 250X-006 (Critical Theory 290)
Seminars in Social and Cultural Anthropology: Special Topics
Memory, Trauma, Territory after the Soviet Collapse

Alexei Yurchak
Thursdays 12-3 pm / 192 Social Sciences Building
Class #: 32671

Comparative Literature 202B (Critical Theory 290)
Paul Celan & The Americas: Poetry After Fascism, Before Post-Democracy?

Robert G. Kaufman
Wednesdays 2-5 pm / Dwinelle 4104
Class #: 26654

Paul Celan’s poetry has often been characterized as the most groundbreaking in European poetic art since 1945; likewise as the poetry—perhaps as the body of work across all the arts—most crucial to the “after Auschwitz” debates that shadow countless artists, critics, and philosophers (though none more consequentially, none more controversially, than Celan and Theodor W. Adorno). What happens when we return to these much-considered works and debates, but supplement “after Auschwitz” with the related yet distinct phrase “after fascism”—while introducing still another term, “before post-democracy?” The question isn’t just speculative. Well before the iconic photos taken on January 6, 2020 of Capitol-storming insurgents alternately waving the Confederacy’s Stars and Bars or wearing the deathshead-imaged “Camp Auschwitz: Work Brings Freedom” sweatshirt, poets, other artists, and critics across the Americas had already broached dialogues between Celan’s work and their own: between their historical materials and formal aesthetic explorations, and those of Celan. Both the convergences and differences mattered. These queries, at least as posed within art and criticism, have asked how aesthetic form and experience might uniquely illuminate the ways that struggles over formal and substantive democracy relate to another artstic-aesthetic archive often thought to have received more attention: histories and historical experiences of genocide. Yet thre’s a substantial if not always apparent record of art trying to engage these phenomena–distinct, however much also related–in tandem. Indeed, art and criticism have for some time paid attention to how the ways that authoritarian, fascist, or neo-fascist movements articulate and pursue core impulses and programs that cannot but be described as genocidal, while also insisting on something else they see as also central to their movements, their governing, their exercise of power: namely, their opposition to democracy. All that–taken together, and just for starters–has sparked questions too about just how many “afters” or “posts” there had and have already been, about what might be the relations among them. Though we’ll read a fair amount of critical, theoretical, and historiographical writings (sociopolitical analysis; philosophy; poetics, aesthetics, and diverse modes of art criticism), most of our reading will be in poetry (with some attention as well to other arts, including sculpture and installation; music; film; painting). Our initial point of departure will involve asking how Celan’s groundbreaking or unprecedented body of German-language poetry—radically innovative in form and content, with great international resonance, and widely perceived to have “gone for broke,” as Adorno famously put it—finds its poetics taken up by poets of different languages, cultures, and sociopolitical situations. We’ll spend approximately the first half of the semester reading Celan (b.1920, d.1970) in English translation (though also hearing and reading/seeing the original German texts, which we’ll always have at hand); we’ll also read a few of Celan’s European interlocutors. In the latter part of the semester, we’ll read poetry from across the Americas that responds to Celan’s work and/or has been received in conversations with it. Our western-hemisphere poetry will come from across Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as the U.S. and Canada. Just as we’ll read Celan in English translation but with some awareness of and work with the German, we’ll do the same with poems originally written in French and Spanish. (Ability to read in German—and/or Spanish and French—will of course prove beneficial, but is by no means required for the seminar, whose working language throughout the semester will be English.) As we read Celan, we’ll consider some of the poetry he regarded as foundational for his writing; and we’ll read poet-contemporaries with whom he engaged. We’ll also undertake readings in some of the aesthetics, critical theory, and philosophy that inform Celan’s work, or that have been significant for its reception history. Among the central issues taken up will be the notoriously “difficult,” “hermetic,” “elliptical,” “obscure” character of Celan’s poetry. We’ll try to evaluate Celan’s claim that the difficulty stems largely from the poetry’s sociopolitical and historical materials themselves, and that his perceived radical experimentalism was simply what was required to bring the materials to form and expression. The seminar will perforce take up the social and personal history often retold in accounts of Celan and his art. Born and raised in Romania (but with German as a a mother-tongue), interned in a Romanian-fascist labor camp during the war, Celan—having lost his parents to the Holocaust—lived most of his postwar life in France. He composed almost all his major poetry in German; he was thus continually vexed by the problem of how to make poems in the very language in which the National Socialist genocide had just been carried out. His wrestling with that and related dilemmas—and his development in consequence of unprecedented formal means of artistic expression that might begin to do justice to his given materials (materials derived from “what has happened” [das, was geschah], Celan’s term for the Holocaust)—led to the creation of a remarkable body of poetry that broke new ground while holding onto and indeed intensifying much in the history of lyric (albeit via a severely attenuated, yet perhaps thereby ever more virtuosic, musicality). It may be no coincidence that that question of “breaking new ground” while “holding onto” also makes Celan’s poetry crucial for something it’s rarely been discussed in relation to: the question of when, why, and if modernism ended, or if, on the other hand, it later struggled to re-invent itself and certain values of critique and emancipation in ways different if not downright inimical to what became known as postmodernism (into which Celan’s work has often, but, at best, awkwardly been drafted). We’ll ask as well how these latter issues might have something to do with the contemporary international crises facing formal and substantive democracy. When we shift hemispheres, we’ll turn to consider how poetry and poetics in the Americas, starting in the mid-1950s, attempts to understand what Celan is doing in poetry and what he’s asking postwar poetry to attempt. Among our queries—which we’ll see various poets likewise raising—will be the degree to which Celan proves translatable (in the literal sense of the translation of his poems into English, French, Spanish; and in the metaphorical sense of attempted translations of his poetry’s poetics, aesthetics, ethics, and politics to contexts that will involve, among other things, the concerns and claims of the working class, anti-colonial, civil rights, feminist, and anti-war movements). We’ll observe this questioning perhaps above all in poets’ processes of thinking, in their poetry and criticism, about what is shared and what’s distinct in the historical experiences of European anti-semitism and New World slavery and racism: their thinking, in short, about what in Celan’s pathbreaking poetry in the wake of European fascism and genocide can, and cannot, help them as their artistic work develops its own relations to pressing ethical and sociopolitical matters. Suffusing these reflections will be the issue of what kinds of critical agency—if any—might be generated from Celanian poetics, and how such agency would relate to longstanding notions of art’s ethical and sociopolitical commitment or engagement. In addition to Celan’s work, the poetry we’ll read will range from brief excerpts to more substantial selections by a number of poets and other artists including, most likely: Hölderlin, Heine, Dickinson, Mallarmé, Rilke, Sachs, Brecht, Bachmann, Daive, Albiach, Du Bouchet, Césaire, Glissant, Darwish, Monchoachi, Zurita, Gelman, Pizarnik, Perlongher, Adnan, Pérez, Paz, Castellanos, Blaser, Brossard, Rothenberg, Duncan, Rich, Levertov, Harjo, Palmer, Joudah, Lloyd, Tejada, Mackey, Rankine, Sigo, Marriott, S. Whitney, D. Salcedo, A. Resnais, and others. Critical, theoretical, historiographical, and/or philosophical readings will likely include writings by Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, Du Bois, Habermas, M. Rogers, T. Halperín Donghi, C. Lafont, Marcuse, Heidegger, Derrida, Kristeva, Agamben, Lacoue-Labarthe, Felstiner, J. Rothenberg, Masiello, M. Cooke, J. Bernstein, M. Jay, A. Carson, P. Oyarzún, and Coetzee.

Comparative Literature 298 (Critical Theory 298)
Reading Arendt for the Present *

Judith Butler
Tuesdays 2-5 pm (Jan 17 2023 – Feb 28 2023) Dwinelle 4125A
Class #: 17129

This course will consider three of Arendt’s main essays, “On Freedom”, “On Violence” and “Civil Disobedience” as well as her engagement with Kafka’s work. We will discuss what it means to read Arendt now, to read against or with or beyond Arendt, and to understand her writings on acting, creating, performing and imagining. We will end with a consideration of statelessness and the right to have rights, focusing on counterfactuals, performatives, and hypotheticals in her imagining past the nation-state. *Course is by permission of the instructor only. Please write a one-page letter to the instructor indicating what brings you to this course, what preparation you have, and how it fits with your ongoing interests. Send your letter of interest to complituga@berkeley.edu no later than Sunday, December 4. This is a two-unit course.

Education 280A (Critical Theory 290)
Socio-cultural Critique of Education

Zeus Leonardo
Tuesdays 10 am-1 pm / 4244 Berkeley Way West
Class #: 31501

This graduate-level course is designed to introduce students to a social and cultural critique of education and society by reading and analyzing classical and contemporary social theories. As a survey course, it examines both the theoretical and practical nature of a critical social theory of education. The concept or process of “critique” as well as discerning what it means to be “critical” will be central to the course. Some of the theoretical frameworks for study include Marxism, feminism, antiracism and anticolonialism, and poststructuralism and postcolonialism. Additionally, the nature of power will be examined and the way that social groups position themselves in such relations. This understanding will be instructive for our ability to confront the structural contours of inequality and the everyday effects of privilege.

Education 281A (Critical Theory 290)
Race, Whiteness Studies and Education

Zeus Leonardo
Mondays 10 am – 1 pm / 4244 Berkeley Way West
Class #: 31502

This graduate-level course is designed to introduce students to the area of whiteness studies and how it has been taken up by Education scholars. As a relatively recent innovation (arguably just over 30 years old), whiteness studies has become a burgeoning literature across many disciplines, from history to literature to education. The course asks the student to assess what this innovation within race theory (as well as secondarily within other theories, such as class and gender analysis) produces in terms of knowledge and understanding of a general racial predicament. For example, what is particular about whiteness studies as a field, which classical race scholarship could not have explained adequately? In addition, the course asks what the conceptual and practical applications of whiteness studies might look like in a field like education. For instance, what does focusing on whiteness in a racially charged atmosphere accomplish in the end, even if it aims to study it critically? Finally, the course asks what can be done, in the name of whiteness studies, to ameliorate racial disparities.

English 203 (Critical Theory 290)
Decolonizing History, Narrative, and Event

Donna Jones
Thursdays 2-5 pm /305 Wheeler
Class #: 23861

This class will examine the question of history and the conceptualization of the modern in postcolonial literature and theory. It is only at death when the possibility of future action for an individual is foreclosed, that we are able to begin to give final significance to what he has done in life. After the implosion of the West in the Great War, colonial intellectuals concluded that the history of the West could be finally written because it had come to an end not in the eternal present of Hegelian triumph but in suicidal despair, not in spite of but because of the very achievements of the Hegelian Geist. The key moments in Hegel’s triumphant narrative of the Geist in its advance to the Prussian state were also re-evaluated, and different aspects of the past became important. Once explored at the margins of European literature in the period of pan-European pacifism, colonial violence, for example, proved itself altogether more fateful. Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, reason itself was revealed to be based on the partial assumptions of the technologist who aimed to master, control and use matter. Also coming under scrutiny was the dialectical theory of history, which implied that past gains are preserved in the higher stages so that no progress is lost and progress is cumulative. Anything worth preserving is sublated. The crisis of the West then led to a revaluation of what had to be negatively dismissed because it had not been preserved, and intensive study of what had been ignored or stood outside the march of progress. The texts chosen for this course are both the classic articulations of the Western narratives of progress and postcolonial works which place the mechanics of progress under rigorous scrutiny.

English 250-002 (Critical Theory 290)
Anticolonialism as Theory

Poulomi Saha
Thursdays 11 am-2 pm / 337 Wheeler
Class #: 32809

Anticolonialism, as historical process and political philosophy, concerns itself with the quest for liberation. This course centers anticolonialism as a vital resource for the rethinking of past, present, and future visions of the end of empire. We will understand anticolonialism in a temporally and geographically expansive sense and that the “post” of postcolonialism does not mean “past.” Postcolonial critique is a comparative project, inclusive of the literature and culture of former European colonies, alongside insurgent minority forms from across the globe, and claims of Indigenous peoples to cultural and territorial sovereignty. We will engage promiscuous, speculative, and recombinant work from the humanities and social sciences that proposes a fresh understanding of the field of postcolonial studies, its legacies, and its futures. The uncertain present of endless war, converging catastrophes, and worsening global inequality reveals the exigency and relevance of postcolonial studies and, at the same time, demands new modes of critical theory. For this reason, the course will engage theoretical readings on race, empire, political possibility from the canon of postcolonial studies and critical theory and expand its range to include contemporary scholarship. The course will be structured colloquium-style, with each week organized around a visit by a scholar whose work was presented at the recent “Anticolonialism as Theory” symposium from a range of disciplines and theoretical orientations including literary studies, anthropology, political science, history, and gender studies.

French 265B / Film 240 (cross-listed) (Critical Theory 290)
Cinema Of Crisis

Anton J. Kaes
Mondays 1-4 pm / Dwinelle 226
Class #: 27000

The seminar looks at German cinema between 1929 and 1934 through the lens of philosophical writings about crisis — economic, political, and cultural. We will analyze selected films from the pivotal years before and after the ascent of Hitler and ask how culture registered the gradual transition from a democratic to an autocratic system of government. Occasionally we will compare the German production with crisis films from other countries (for instance, King Vidor’s 1934 Our Daily Bread or Dovzhenko’s 1930 Earth). Our interrogation will also address larger theoretical questions, such as the entanglement of aesthetics and politics,
modernity and myth, and populism and working class, as well as the very
definitions of crisis, state of exception, and fascist thought. We will screen films by Bert Brecht, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Leni Riefenstahl, and lesser-known documentary and avant-garde works. Most importantly, we will discuss critical interventions by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt, as well as retrospective readings of the period by Theodor W. Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, and Hannah Arendt, among others. Readings are in English.

French 260A/Italian 235 (Critical Theory 290)
Borders, Media and the Crisis Imaginary

Debarati Sanyal and Rhiannon Welch
Thursdays 2-5 pm / Dwinelle 6331
Class #: 30873 and Class #: 32547

This team-taught course challenges the rhetoric of border ‘crisis’ through an investigation of visual media and multidisciplinary theory. Our primary works will include feature-length narrative and documentary films, as well as experimental media and installations that convey the complex operations of contemporary borderscapes and myriad forms of resistance and refusal. We will consider theories of biopolitics/necropolitics, racialized imperial histories and their afterlives, border theory, the intersections of natural elements (water, soil, air) and media. Additional sites of engagement include the critical and creative resources of postcolonial theory and Black thought. Among the questions we will explore are: How do testimonies by migrants and their representations resist the EU border’s violence, historicize the refugee “crisis,” and convey new modes of becoming or belonging? How do contemporary border technologies and policies reanimate histories of racialized and imperial violence? What forms of dissent, becoming and belonging are taking shape at borders? How do we understand poesis– as in making, self-fashioning, world-building– as lived practices as well as representations that stage the power of life to endure and escape the border’s power over life? What are the possibilities and limits of humanitarian approaches and human rights discourses on refugees–from the Sahara to the Mediterranean, from Calais to Ukraine? Theoretical works to include: Sandro Mezzadra, Christina Sharpe, Rinaldo Walcott, Miriam Ticktin, Achille Mbembe, Janet Roitman, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Rosi Braidotti, and Roberto Esposito, among others. Knowledge of French and/or Italian preferred, but not required.

Students may enroll either through Italian Studies or French; course counts as an elective (290) toward the DE in Critical Theory. Students will have the opportunity to participate in a Spring conference on borders and media.

French 265B / Film 240 (cross-listed) (Critical Theory 290)
What is Sex?

Damon Young
Seminar: Fridays in 226 Dwinelle / 1-4 pm Screening: Wednesdays in 142 Dwinelle / 5-7 pm
Class #: 26999 (Film)
Class #: 31617 (French)

Depending on the context, “sex” might name a set of acts (defined between institutions of medicine and the law); a genre of relationality; or an idea and ideology of the biological division of the species. Sex is bound up in imaginaries of biological and social reproduction; of personal identity and trauma; and it lies at the heart of fears and fantasies about racial difference and national belonging. Sex is also centrally at issue, overtly or implicitly, in many or even most genres of narrative media, from the marriage plot through to romantic comedy, horror, melodrama, and of course pornography. In this course, we will consider sex as a philosophical, social, political, and representational question and problem, drawing on work in psychoanalytic theory; radical feminism; queer theory; trans studies; and a French tradition of erotic philosophy influenced by Sade and Bataille. As part of this theoretical investigation, we will examine the ways sex shapes genres and systems of representations, sometimes pushing them to their limits, sometimes safely contained within them. To this end, we will consider French feminist films and literature that use explicit sexuality as a form of politicized aesthetics; contemporary iterations of confessionality as the production of a gendered and racialized sexuality; and examples of cinema in which sex—in both senses—comes into question, or names the very question that cannot be posed. Authors and film-makers may include: Freud; Lacan; Sade; Bataille; Alenca Zupancic; Avgi Saketopoulou; Andrea Dworkin; Paisley Currah; Leo Bersani; Andrea Long Chu; Paul Preciado; Judith Butler; Lauren Berlant; Brontez Purnell; Jean Genet; Hortense Spillers; Kadji Amin; Marquis Bey; Jean-Luc Nancy; Eugenie Brinkema; Catherine Breillat; Pier Paolo Pasolini; Céline Sciamma; and Catherine Millet. Includes occasional screenings on Wed nights.

German 256/Comparative Literature 250 (Critical Theory 290)
Forming Perception Poetically: Analogy, Allegory, Symbolism

Niklaus E. Largier
Thursdays 3-6 pm / Dwinelle 282
Class #: 31792 / 31807

Notions of analogy, allegory, and symbolism refer to rhetorical devices and practices, forms of poetic language, and modes of forming perception and knowledge. Often understood in opposition to conceptual thought, they are connected with premodern epistemological orders, magical or mythical relations to things and the world, and to a series of modern movements from Romanticism to Symbolism, Surrealism, and Magical Realism. In this seminar, we will make an attempt to understand the basic aspects of analogy, allegory, and symbolism, moving from modes of allegorical reading in Late Antiquity to medieval practices of the imagination, Renaissance notions of magic and symbolism, and Baroque emblematic thought, to modern and modernist engagements with the symbolic. Each session will focus on one particular primary text. A syllabus, including a selection of theoretical texts, will be available in early January. Theoretical texts will include 19th century aesthetic theory, Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault.

Philosophy 290-4 (Critical Theory 290)
Political Philosophy: The Case for Political Realism vs. Political Moralism

Hans Sluga
Wednesday 12-2 pm /Moses 234
Class #:17721

In his late writings Bernard Williams sought to make a case for political realism as against a political moralism he identified with Kant, Rawls, and Habermas. But what is political realism?
The seminar will explore this question through reference to Williams’ In the Beginning was the Deed and Truth and Truthfulness. We will also be looking at writings by Raymond Geuss, Michel Foucault, John Dunn, Ci Jiwei, and a few others.

Rhetoric 240G (Critical Theory 240)
Contemporary Black Thought

Fumi Okiji
Tuesday 3:30-6:30 pm / 7415 Dwinelle
Class #: 10048

This seminar considers contemporary black thought as a substantial critique of Western modernity, and as a source of social and epistemological alternative. Central to our discussions will be the field’s ontological turn, approached by way of a number of thinkers—Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Fred Moten, and Nahum Chandler, among them. We will also trace key ideas currently circulating in black critical thought back to forerunners such as Hortense Spillers, Cedric Robinson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Our enquiries will devote time to specifically rhetorical and aesthetic responses to the challenges that these contemporary renderings of blackness pose.

Sociology 290 / GWS 210 (cross-listed) (Critical Theory 290)
Masculinity and Capitalism

Raka Ray and Leslie Salzinger
Mondays 12-2 pm / Social Sciences Building 402
Class #: 19756

Capitalism is often understood as a system that overrides all in its path, and gender as a system that fundamentally problematizes the experiences of “women.” Sometimes masculinity emerges from its unmarked status in the investigation of specific versions of “men’s” identities. However in this class we will bring questions about masculinity and political economy into conversation, asking how capitalism has historically emerged in and through masculinity as a (hetero)normative structure, and how diverse masculinities are produced and enacted in different capitalist moments, with varying consequences for the subjects so addressed. We will explore these questions through theory, history and ethnography, leveraging the wide empirical variety of forms of masculine subjectification to think about what masculinity is and how it relates to capitalist functioning. Throughout the term, we will ask what we learn by noting the structure’s emergence in relation to race, nationality and other discursive structures of power and subjectification and in a diversity of historical and geographical contexts, and we will explore what these variations illuminate about the operations of capitalism as a system over time and space.

Spanish 280 (Critical Theory 290)
Sense Making & Thought from the Global South

Natalia Brizuela
Wednesdays 3-6 pm / Dwinelle 204
Class #: 19768

This seminar will explore practices of sense-making from the Global South, with a particular focus on Latin America & the Caribbean. Sense-making is the entangled exercise of critical sensing and critical thought that is not founded on the Western logo-centric practice of reason, but rather on an embodied, relational and cosmological sentir-pensar (Escobar). Our current planetary crisis -at ecological, political, economic, and subjective scales- has pushed practitioners of numerous Western disciplines to rethink the contours of their fields, while sites of modern Western knowledge production more broadly have begun to recognize the fault lines of logocentric, instrumental reason. The seminar will address our cosmopolitical present through the study of critical interventions built through forms of expression not anchored exclusively on the Western understanding of reason, as we learn with and through images, performances, singing and texts as different but equal forms of sense-making, that other worlds, of entanglement and solidarity, exist and are possible. We will engage the work of Caístulo, Gustavo Caboco, Paz Encina, Arturo Escobar, Malcom Ferdinand, Ana Gallardo, Verónica Gago, Lorgia García-Peña, Ailton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa, Las Nietas del Nonó, Francia Marquez, Beatriz Nascimento, Grace Passo, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Rita Segato, Maboula Soumahoro, Denetem Touam Bona, Sylvia Wynter, Dani Zelko.