This advanced interdisciplinary seminar course introduces students to contemporary readings in Black studies, Indigenous Studies, colonialism, queer and trans studies in relation to the body. We might think about the body as a physical manifestation, a material being, one in relation, one that takes up space, or not. How might we orientate ourselves as we bear witness to those whose presence clamors for attention in the social and political periphery? In this course we’ll be thinking about what it is to write the body (both as an act of legibility, and as political practice of inclusion or exclusion) first through Franz Fanon and Audre Lorde, but branching out to think with other thinkers, artists, poets, and novelists to ask: how is a body--or how are we—articulated, or not? What are the limits of legibility, of opacity? What are the archives of those whose presences remain unwritten, or unrecognized, in practices of knowledge and power? As we consider these questions collectively through the critical reading, discussion, and reflection, we hope to expand the idea of the body beyond the material form to think alongside conceptions of containment, power, and resistance.
Cross-listed with GNDS 839
