Description:
This course wrestles with who and what counts as human, and considers the political and ethical stakes of different theorizations and representations of the human. We look to how formulations of the human help shape, expose, and disrupt the norms that, in constituting who counts as human and who does not, determine who lives and who dies; who receives protection from legal and other institutions; and who is expendable not only when it comes to war, but also within systems of justice and the structuring of civil society.
Because understandings of who and what count as human play a crucial role in distributing and withholding human rights, and in upholding state-sanctioned structures of domination, debates over “the human” are fierce, consequential, and thoroughly political. Scholarship grappling with the concept of the human ranges across disciplines, just as determinations of the human exceed any one disciplinary formation or discursive field. In ways explored by a range of scholars, the terms human, humane, civilized, civil subject, man, citizen, and person are often related or conflated, and sometimes disarticulated.
To lay the groundwork for our discussions, in Part One of this course, we will review theories of the human that are central to humanism. These theorizations posit the human as a “civilized” (i.e., imperial) subject of European origins who is white, male, and in possession of money and land.
We then turn to contemporary scholarship on the human—to various and sometimes intersecting perspectives that come out of queer, feminist, postcolonial, settler colonial, Indigenous, Palestine and Black studies. This work challenges the universalism of humanism’s human, and hegemonic understandings of human rights:
Part Two of the class takes up the human in relation to race, with a focus on scholarship emerging out of Black studies, one of the most fertile sites for theorizing the human as a thoroughly racialized category. As we investigate the antiblackness at the foundation of hegemonic formulations of the human, we read differing responses to antiblackness: Afropessimist, Africanfuturist, abolitionist, black queer and feminist.
In Part Three, we study the human in relation to Indigeneity. As they challenge understandings of the human that naturalize heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and colonialism, many of these readings challenge assumptions that the human is a distinct category, and instead understand the human as kin to and interdependent with the human’s more-than-human relations, including land, water, elemental forces, and non-human creatures.
In each section, our readings of theoretical texts are accompanied by literary texts that serve as touchstones for engaging (and in some cases complicating or challenging) the ideas within and across different theoretical approaches to the human. These texts along with the theoretical readings also articulate with other ways of theorizing the human that students will be invited to focus on for their presentations—for example, the human and the cyborg or the machine, the human and the animal, the human and war, the human and Palestine, the human and the migrant, the human and gender, the human and the citizen, the human and madness, etc.
Assignments: Grades will be determined by the following components: seminar paper of 15-20 pages (~50%) + proposal + outline + presentation (~5-10%); 5-6 page essay (~15%); class presentation + handout (~10%); weekly letters to the class (~15%); responses to events, presentation of texts, written takeaways. For written assignments, I am open to experimentation with multigenre approaches/
Required Texts (full length):
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1984).
No‘u Revilla, Ask the Brindled (2022).
Films:
Ryan Coogler, dir., Black Panther (2018).
Danis Goulet, dir., Night Raiders (2021).
Tentative list / examples of readings and video links that will be posted to Laulima:
“Afropessimism and Its Others: A discussion between Hortense J. Spillers and Lewis R. Gordon” (2021).
Ruha Benjamin, “Black AfterLives Matter” (2018)
Ta-nehisi Coates, excerpts from Between the World and Me (2015).
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, introduction to Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (2020).
Tiffany Lethabo King, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight” (2017).
Walter D. Mignolo, “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human” (2015).
Nick Mitchell, “The View from Nowhere: On Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism” (2020).
Kevin Quashie, Introdution to Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being (2021).
Christina Sharpe, selections from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016).
Frank B. Wilderson III, “Afro-Pessimism & the End of Redemption” (2016).
Frank B. Wilderson III, “‘We’re trying to destroy the world’ Anti-Blackness & Police Violence After Ferguson” (2015).
Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues” (1994).
Jodi A. Byrd, “What’s Normative Got to Do with It?: Toward Indigenous Queer Relationality” (2020).
Glen Coultard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. “Grounded Normativity/ Place-Based Solidarity” (2016).
Mahmoud Darwish, “The Second Olive Tree”
Candace Fujikane, Selections from Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future (2021).
Daniel Heath Justice, selection from Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (2018).
Mohammed El-Kurd, excerpts from Rifqa (2021).
Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada and No‘u Revilla, “Introduction: Mana from the Mauna” (2020).
Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada, “We Live in the Future. Come Join Us” (2015).
Malak Mattar, “Art, Gaza and Decolonization” (2023).
Brandy Nālani McDougall, selections from ‘Āina Hānau (2023).
Nora Lester Murad and Danna Masad, “Rest in My Shade” (2018)
Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, selection from Remembering Our Intimacies (2021).
Steven Salaita, selection from Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (2016).
Steven Salaita, selections from An Honest Living (2024).
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, selections from As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2021).
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, selections from Islands of Decolonial Love (2013).
Haunani-Kay Trask, selections from Light in the Crevice Never Seen (1994).
Haunani-Kay Trask, selections from Night Is A Sharkskin Drum (2002).
Rafeef Ziadeh, “We Teach Life Sir” (2011)
Student Learning Outcomes:
- Appreciation of how literary and cultural texts participate in understandings of the human.
- Ability to situate your work within larger critical and theoretical conversations.
- Strengthened skills in close readings of literary and cultural texts.
- Strengthened skills in working across different academic disciplines.
- Advanced skills in analyzing different literary genres in relation to cultural and political contexts.
- Enhanced ability to craft a research paper, including developing a research question, formulating a compelling thesis, and choosing and analyzing sources to develop and strengthen your arguments.
- Enhanced ability to give oral presentations to students that clearly convey a body of information and analysis.
- Experimentation with writing (about) theory, criticism, and cultural texts in creative ways, including through personal narrative.
- Foundational knowledge about literature that takes up themes of antiblackness, Indigeneity, settler colonial.
- Readings in contemporary settler colonial, Indigenous, queer, feminist and abolitionist theory.