revolution, and post-socialist reality in China. Key themes include the traumatic experiences of Chinese coolie labor under racial capitalism, the emergence of a new labor culture during the Chinese New Culture Movement, women's affective labor during the mass mobilization of the Red Army, eco-critical readings of socialist labor films, socialist labor science fiction, and the post-socialist nostalgia surrounding labor utopias. Throughout, we will analyze how shifting politico-economic contexts have conditioned representations of labor, exploring the diverse ideological functions and radical potentials of labor imaginaries. This course prepares students to think critically about labor conditions as well as emancipatory labor politics and alternative futures.

The Political. The course examines the relationship between performance, performativity, and politics, and how such complex relationship reflects, (re)enacts, interrupts, and changes in discourse and practice in shifting historical and social settings. With an emphasis on politics as conflict, we will explore the complex relationship between performance and performative as the constitution of "the political" in the intertwining histories of aesthetics and power.

Please contact instructor for course description.

This course queries notions of structure and infrastructure in critical theory and contemporary criticism. We will first examine the role that “structure” plays in both Marxist and Poststructuralist thought. Then, we will turn to the burgeoning field of critical infrastructural studies in both the humanities and social sciences. In so doing, we will consider how the study of infrastructure can provide new figures for thought as well as new concrete objects of humanistic study.

Este curso se propone abordar la historia y la cultura brasileña desde su producción teórico-crítica local. Con este fin está organizado en torno a ejes temáticos y problemas relevantes que han marcado la trayectoria de Brasil (o brasiles) desde el siglo XIX hasta el presente.
Se espera que lxs estudiantes adquieran una visión introductoria, pero no por eso menos compleja, que les permita reflexionar de manera crítica y descolonizadora en torno a la producción de conocimiento en esta significativa región de América Latina. Se estudian, por ejemplo, Ignez Sabino, Gilberto Freire, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, António Cândido, Roberto Schwarz, Sueli Carneiro, Silviano Santiago, Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda y Suely Rolnik, entre otrxs.
Asimismo, el curso trabaja con una diversidad de prácticas simbólicas (fotografía, cine y otras textualidades) que permiten indagar en la conflictividad y heterogeneidad de una sociedad poscolonial y posesclavista como la brasileña.
La bibliografía del curso será proporcionada en español o inglés. Sin embargo, quienes deseen leer en portugués podrán hacerlo.

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.