LTCO 285 - Literature and Aesthetics

Mikhail Bakhtin

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTCS 250 - Topics in Cultural Studies

Asian Cinema and Transmedia Theories

While Asian cinemas increasingly begin to win international recognition by winning such prestigious awards as Oscars or Golden Globes, western academy remains relatively negligent regarding film and transmedia theories produced in Asia. Our course aims to fill in the gap by inviting directors and critics from Asia to discuss their film matters and methods. Among the issues to be considered, for instance, Tiktok and the alternative subcultures, video games and nationalism, Sinophone cinema in the era of a new cold war, transnational migrant subjects and their multisensory, transcultural, or inter-religious experiences (moving from Tibetan Buddhism to Muslim or new evangelical cults), and many other topics. The seminar will be conducted in conjunction with San Diego's Asian Film Festival.

LTEN 256 - Postcolonial Discourses

Modernity in Question: Coloniality, Postcoloniality, Decoloniality

Gabriel Bámgbóṣé

This seminar will put postcolonial and decolonial discourses in conversation, focusing on the fundamental questions they raise about modernity. What is modernity? What is coloniality? Is modernity a colonial or an unfinished project? How do we apprehend its entanglement of the universal and the particular? What are the visions of modernity, and what modes of worlding do they institute? What are the stakes of pluralizing modernity to legitimize other/alternative modernities? Or should modernity be transcended in Enrique Dussel’s sense of trans-modernity? In this seminar, we will address these questions as they invite critical reflection on the meanings of decolonization in postcolonial and decolonial discourses. We will explore the critique of power, knowledge, race, class, gender, nation, language, culture, and ecology in these discourses. Readings may include theoretical texts by Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, L. S. Senghor, Chela Sandoval, Sylvia Wynter, V. Y. Mudimbe, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Achille Mbembe, Ato Quayson, Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, María Lugones, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Harry Garuba, and Malcom Ferdinand. Students are invited to bring their diverse literary archives to the critical questions addressed in this seminar.

LTSP 272 - Literature and Society Studies

Ecocolonialismo: Narrativas y Imágenes de la transición enérgetica en América Latina

Luis Martín-Cabrera

Please contact instructor for course description.

LTTH 210A - Proseminar on Literary Scholarship

Géraldine Fiss

Thinking Across Borders

This is the first in the three-course series of introductory graduate seminars for first-year PhD students in the Literature department. The Proseminar has three main goals: to introduce new PhD students to a wide range of foundational and contemporary conversations in comparative literature to introduce students to the department’s faculty and their fields of study and to train students in the foundational skills of graduate study.

The course’s theme, “Thinking Across Borders,” reflects the uniquely multilingual, interdisciplinary structure of the UCSD Literature department, and across our conversations this quarter, we will keep reflecting on what it means to think across national, linguistic, disciplinary, and temporal borders in our work as scholars and teachers. It also reflects the situatedness of UCSD itself on unceded land of the Kumeyaay nation, which is currently occupied by the heavily militarized US/Mexico border, and in a city that has long been instrumental to US empire-building in the Pacific and beyond. We will continue to return to the question of situatedness in both its spatial and metaphorical registers. What does it mean to be situated in a field, or across multiple fields? How are we situated in relation to our archives and our scholarly communities? Where do we know from, and what does it mean to begin to know from here?

The first half of the quarter will be devoted to tracing important critical conversations in comparative, transnational, and world literary/cultural studies. We will consider the stakes of terms such as “comparative,” “world,” “planetary,” and “transnational” as critical categories, and we will explore multiple methodologies for working across languages, borders, and disciplines. The second half of the quarter will be devoted to a departmental colloquium of works in progress and recently-published work by UCSD Literature faculty members across multiple languages and fields. These discussions will be open to the entire department, but will be guided, moderated, and facilitated by LTTH210A students.