This seminar explores the political theology and missionary methods of the Spanish Empire during its period of greatest expansion across the Pacific between the 16th and 18th centuries and its nadir with the rise of trans-Pacific scientific exploration and navigation among the European powers. We will begin by challenging and critically examining some of our fundamental assumptions about this history, which are reinforced by the discourse of pacification and spiritual conquest as well as our contemporary reaction to it. My aim is to develop a conceptual toolbox for foregrounding the frontier character of the Pacific for both the European and Asian powers and developing its consequences for the study of Pacific cultures. Topics will include the institutional anarchy of the Spanish Crown, the protracted nature of the conquest, debates on the nature of international law between "open" and "closed" seas, the politics of expediency and exception [oikonomia], the legacy of deculturation, and the "infrapolitics" (to borrow a term from James Scott) of frontier societies. As a course in the Comparative Literature sections, students will be asked to do research in more than one language.

This course fulfills the Historical Breadth requirement for the Ph.D. program.

LTCO 287

This seminar explores Caribbean literary production from the Spanish, French and Anglophone Antilles.  It is designed to present an overview of both major literary movements (anti-slavery discourse, the Caribbean Artists Movement, negritude, archipelago studies) and nationalist and diasporic traditions that grew out of the region’s engagement with empire, revolution, and postcolonial labor arrangements. Materials focus on language and its possibilities, from experimental prose to traditions grounded in oral storytelling. We also explore how writers have expressly engaged historical questions.  Close attention is paid to questions of genre, particularly the novel, short stories, the essay, and poetry.  The course includes the work of authors such as Juan Francisco Manzano, José Martí, M. NourbeSe Philip, Edouard Glissant, V.S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid, Marlon James, Audre Lorde and Edwidge Danticat. Students will also have an opportunity to explore the expanding field of digital humanities work in Caribbean studies. 

This seminar investigates the affordances and limits of the “biopolitical turn” across a number of fields—in particular, critical race studies, queer theory, and literary studies—as a framework for approaching the entanglements of “Enlightenment” with slavery, empire, and the emergence of modern racial classification. What do we gain by understanding this period’s intellectual categories, literary forms, and modes of colonial governance as biopolitical, and how might the category of the biopolitical itself limit our apprehension of this period’s engagements with life, death, bodies, the human, sensation, race, sex, and subsistence? After a theoretical grounding in the concept of biopolitics and its critics (e.g. Foucault, Mbembe, Weheliye), we will ground our methodological conversations in the literary and historical archives of the British Empire during the long eighteenth century. Major topics may include: plantation and counterplantation ecologies, sovereign power and the joint-stock company, eighteenth-century theories of population and their afterlives, and the relation between literary form and theories of human life as both object and mode of governance. Most broadly, this course aims to equip you to engage meaningfully with the many theoretical and scholarly fields that currently grapple with “Enlightenment” and its afterlives in their engagements with race, empire, power, knowledge, and the idea of the human. 

LTEN 231

There are three main goals in this proseminar. 1) It introduces the faculty at the Department of Literature to new doctoral students. 2) It introduces students to key texts that have influenced our faculty in diverse areas of literary study. 3) It demonstrates the kind of writing that current scholars are engaging in, with the goal of having students model essays on examples by current faculty. Each week, individual faculty is invited to present her/his own work.