5 courses with the subject CPLS GU, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
CPLS GU4111World Philology4
CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement Philology, broadly defined as the practice of making sense of texts, is a fundamental human activity that has been repeatedly institutionalized in widely separated places and times. In the wake of the formation of the modern academic disciplines in the nineteenth century and their global spread, it became difficult to understand the power and glory of older western philology, and its striking parallels with other pre- and early modern forms of scholarship around the globe. This class seeks to create a new comparative framework for understanding how earlier generations made sense of the texts that they valued, and how their practices provide still-vital models for us at a time of upheaval in the format and media of texts and in our scholarly approaches to them. Students will encounter key fields of philology—textual criticism, lexicography, grammar, and, above all, commentary—not in the abstract but as instantiated in relation to four foundational works—the Confucian Analects, the Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, the Aeneid, and the Tale of Genji—and the scholarly traditions that grew up around them. We are never alone when we grapple with the basic question of how to read texts whose meaning is unclear to us. Over the course of the semester, this class will foster a global understanding of the deep roots and strange parallels linking contemporary reading and interpretation to the practices of the past. East Asian, General and Comparative
How is performance conceived and instrumentalized to fulfill an ideological design? How is ideology transmitted as performance? Centering on National Socialism and Communism, this course explores that and similar questions by examining the political, social, and cultural performances (of Hitler and Stalin, of race and progress, of postwar trials) in the Third Reich and the Soviet Union by engaging a broad range of primary materials (films, documentaries, plays, newsreels, mass spectacles, artifacts of fine art) and by reading widely in the literature of political philosophy and performance studies
CPLS GU4162Transnational Feminisms-China and Beyond3.00
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
CPLS GU4325Abolition Medicine: Medical Racisms and Anti-Racisms3.00
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 experimentation to public health xenophobic fear mongering. The second half of the semester will be dedicated to examining medical and grassroots anti-racist practices: from the free health clinics and hospital takeovers of the Black Panther and Young Lords Parties, to environmental activism in Flint and the Sioux Rock Reservation to antiracist AIDS and COVID activism
We have a consciousness of ourselves as placed specially in history, in an epoch which is essentially different from all that has come before: the modern. In respect of having such a discourse about ourselves, minimally, it may be true. Since at least the seventeenth century, intellectuals have been elaborating histories of modernity’s origin and theories of its distinction. This course does not attempt to adjudicate what is the true or best theory of the modern, but rather inquires into the discursive and historical conditions for telling narratives about modernity’s advent and constructing theories of its nature, and their aporiai. Topics will vary but may include the advent of “history” as a genre and non-Western “historical” genres; providential time, the saeculum, and prophecy; the dialectic of break and period; the delimiting of non-modernities, such as the primitive/traditional, the feudal, and the postmodern; the search for narrative agents, such as the nation, the state, and the class; schemes of the ontological disunity of modernity; modernism, the avant-garde, and the aesthetic forms of historicity; capitalism, socialism, and revolution; philosophy’s claim to historical diagnosis and the therapeutic refusal thereof; the desire for and attempts to construct anti-historical forms of narration and their limits
