This course explores the plasticity and disruption of queer theory through queer of color critique’s recent and major contributions. While queer of color critique too emerged in the Global North with an eye to global sexualities, this course will emphasize theoretical and aesthetic productions that emerge from and emphasize Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, China, Korea, Turkey, Palestine, the Hispanophone Caribbean, among other sites of interruption. The course will cover concepts like plasticity, materialism, translation, debility, repair, pornotroping, and temporality as they relate to Blackness, transness, Indigeneity, and Brownness. We will read works by Roderick Ferguson, José Esteban Muñoz, Amber Musser, Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Evren Savci, Petrus Liu, Mark Rifkin, Jody Bird, Jasbir Puar, Pedro Pereira, PJ DiPietro, among others. The course is not meant to be exhaustive of a field, rather looks to create points of departure to think queer of color critique’s potentialities and pitfalls.

This seminar considers the generative discomforts, limits, and possibilities of refusal by communities of color in relation (but not limited) to the US. We will explore texts that take up the political, aesthetic, affective, and theoretical stakes in individual and collective acts of refusing. Drawing on the work of Tina Campt (2019), we too will ask: “How do we write, think, perform, practice, visualize, engage, theorize, story, or enact a practice of refusal?” Moreover, we will address how these acts of seeming dissent negate, critique, and interrupt the world as it is to thereby make room for the way it could be.

What is the so-called lyric? Literary kind or invention of criticism? Generic category or way of reading and knowing? How does the canonical Western lyric tradition cosmologize human and world? What are its colonial uses and racialized legacies? How might these legacies be at stake in the methods of reading enshrined in certain strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglo-American literary criticism? How do other lyric traditions (sometimes called the post-romantic or “revived” lyric) cosmologize to decolonial ends? This course explores the lyric as normatively understood and its many discontents. Reading widely across poetries, criticism, and theory, we’ll explore how seemingly idealist phenomena—lyric as a generic category and concept, poetic tropes, methodological infrastructures—are intermingled with material processes of (de)humanization. We’ll also trace the legacies of the canonical Western lyric tradition (particularly as iconized by the Romantics) in literary criticism—and as torqued or eclipsed by other, experimental, and / or unassimilable poetic genealogies.

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, and will be guided, moderated, and facilitated by LTTH210A students.