In this seminar we will interpret various instantiations of social and cultural theories produced outside of European and American academia.  Since such theories live in a variety of forms which are not restricted to traditional philosophical or sociological discourses, the seminar will also include the discussion of stories, poetry, films, and the arts as valid vehicles of theorization.  In this installment, we will concentrate on theorists and theories from the Caribbean  and South America while studying the works of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Winter, Lucrecia Martel, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Déborah Danowski, Ciro Guerra, and Enrique Dussel.

The video essay blurs the boundaries between academic analysis and creative approaches to film criticism. Taking the meaning of essay (“to attempt” or “to try”) seriously, the course encourages experimentation and play with form, style, structure, and mode of address. Our research-creations will draw on multiple senses of the essay: descriptive, reflective, personal, poetic, and provisional. We seek to hold in tension the theoretical and experiential, visual and tactile, conventional and idiosyncratic, didactic and meditative. This multimodal course combines scholarly research with artistic practice in the study and production of the video essay. Course readings include texts by scholars, critics, and filmmakers from different genres, periods, and national contexts. Films and videos range from didactic and scholarly to poetic and personal approaches and encompass documentary and avant-garde traditions. They may include Dziga Vertov, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Su Friedrich, Isaac Julien, Kevin B. Lee, Chantal Akerman, Agnes Varda, Arthur Jafa, Tran T. Kim-Trang. Students will produce a series of short video exercises throughout the quarter. The final will be a polished video essay based on the student’s personal research.

LTCS 222

Vision has long been been the privileged sense, ever more privileged in our present universe of screens. In this course, we will first consider briefly Aristotle’s canonical and hierarchical list of the senses—vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell--, and then look at some ancient Greek and Roman texts, focusing especially on the lowest of the senses in that hierarchy, smell. We will then move to topics of potential student interest: disability in relation to the senses the senses as they have figured in discriminations of class, race, gender and ethnicity immigration and xenophobia animal studies, animals’ senses the construction of the modern Western sensorium as an instrument of power in colonialism, the mind/body dichotomy in modernity, pleasures and pains of the senses, cross-cultural and comparative studies of the ordering of the sensory body. Possible readings, depending on students’ research projects, include Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, Yannis Hamilakis, Archaeology and the Senses, Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonisation and the Reordering of French Culture, and others to be selected for students’ oral presentations in the second half of the seminar. 

LTCS 225

Scholars locate MX-US border art’s origins in the 1980s San Diego-Tijuana corridor where cultural producers turned to performance, conceptual, cinematic, and literary practices to corrupt the logic of the statistic, the percentile, the spreadsheet, the exposé. In this course, we will consider a growing archive of cultural production, the work’s collective commitments to addressing extreme labor situations during and following a Mexican-US neoliberal transition routinely rendered synonymous with 1) the deindustrialization of the US Midwest, 2) the dismantling of the Mexican parastate, the devastation of small Mexican agribusiness and maritime industries, the opening of Mexican markets, 3) the emergence of a reconfigured North American racial capitalism inseparable from post-1994 and post-9/11 (2001) border militarization, the sensationalist criminalization of undocumented entrance, and coordinated mass incarceration/detention, 4) the advent of a sex/gender system coincident with free trade and export-processing zones, 5) the funneling of hemispheric narco-flows through Greater Mexico, (6) the rise of alter-globalization movements inspired by Zapatismo, and 7) Culture Wars after decolonial and social movements including the Chicano/a/x Movement/s. Turning to manifestos, murals (Chicano Park), embodied actions, poetry, nonfiction, film, scholarship, the inSITE special collections, the ongoing MexiCali Biennial and configuration of Tijuana-San Diego as “World Design Capital,” we’ll address site-specific articulations of the Mexican-US borderlands and the Border with a capital “B,” at times fast-forwarding the clock to (post-) COVID speculations of the borderlands’ futures as a “critical regionalism,” archipelago of extractivist conflict, and activated assemblage of indigenous territory. Possible texts for seminar conversation: work by BAW/TAF, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lourdes Portillo, Chantal Akerman, Sayak Valencia, Cristina Rivera Garza, Postcommodity, cognate collective, and Omar Pimienta. Mindful of UCSD’s location, all conversations will be predicated on the acknowledgment that we too live in the borderlands and are producing borderwork.

Please contact instructor for course description.

This seminar focuses on the political theology, missionary methods, and indigenous survivals and transformations under the Spanish Empire during its period of greatest expansion across the Pacific between the 16th and 18th centuries. 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 assumptions behind the accomplishment(s) of Hispanization / Hispanic acculturation. We will also explore the social and cultural responses to “the mission as frontier institution” as well as being an agent of frontierization. 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 cultural genocide, and the "infrapolitics" (to borrow a term from James Scott) of frontier societies.

This course fulfills the Historical Breadth requirement for the Ph.D. program. Requirements include: participation in all seminars, 3 short papers (2pp.) due weeks 3, 5, and 8 of the quarter a final project / presentation on topic related to the seminar (week 10) and a longer paper (12-15pp.) based on or related to the final project.

LTSP 272

This is the third in the three-part introductory theory sequence for PhD students in the UCSD Literature department. This segment will focus on contemporary conversations in literary and critical theory on method, field-formation, the university, and the labor of knowledge-production.