ALICE KAPLAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

Co-listed with History 292-0-20 and Latin American and Caribbean Studies 391-0-20

Crimes, deeds, and spoils of drug traffickers have saturated pop culture for the last decades. From telenovelas to Hollywood movies, passing through binge-worthy TV shows, protagonists and conflicts of the drug history of the Americas have been valuable raw materials for the entertainment industry. This course is designed for students to identify, trace, and analyze these audiovisual productions in order to explore and understand: (a) the main cycles of formation and consolidation of the illegal drugs business and drug wars, the inners dynamics, and most important actors and settings; (b) the plot devices and aesthetic mechanisms with which audiovisual producers have commodified history as fiction; and (c) the effects of these types of narratives and imageries in the creation of new social values and cultural understandings regarding the problems and challenges of our contemporary world. We accomplish these three objectives by watching feature and documentary films; reading a few selected works of history, anthropology, and journalism; and using the tools and technologies of digital humanities in a series of individual and collaborative projects. The goal is to produce an open-access digital repository on drug history as entertainment in the Americas.

In this course, students will research a case study from among the many refugee and migration crises that have dominated the news cycle in recent years. The final project is a short video about your case study.

To develop your research projects, the class foregrounds different methodological approaches: 1) To move beyond journalism, we will conduct primary and secondary historical research to understand the complex historical roots of each case study. 2) We will analyze and practice forms of ethnographic writing to better situate and describe the lived experiences of migration and exile, both past and present. 3) We will pay attention to various forms of media, whether print culture, sound, or visual media, to interrogate but also experiment with contemporary modes of narrating and conveying human experience in the digital age. Our work in class will be collaborative, thus a key prerequisite is that you are mature and self-motivated. You do not need to have prior research experience, but you need to demonstrate a desire to dig into your topic and hone your ability to write deeply informed, rigorous, and nuanced arguments and to think about creative ways to bring rigorous historical and ethnographic detail to visual storytelling.

Students are required to petition for permission to enroll in the class—see instructions in the “Registration Requirements” section of CAESAR.

Co-listed with Environmental Policy and Culture 390-0-20

Environmental Justice in Modern South Asia is an undergraduate class on the unequal experiences and effects of environmental change in South Asia, drawing primarily on case studies from India. Since at least the early 1990s, rapid economic growth, massive infrastructural projects, democratic transformations and global threats of climate change have characterized the South Asian region. Such political, economic, and ecological processes come together to worsen the lives and livelihoods of marginalized people typically. They tend to intensify their vulnerability to environmental degradation, with historical structures of inclusion and exclusion profoundly shaping how natural resources are accessed and distributed. While the regional focus is on South Asia, at the heart of this course is a broader concern that environmental questions are always questions of equality and social justice.

The class will examine how issues of justice and nature are framed within law and official policy debates, within social movements and right-based struggles, as well as within people’s moral imaginations and everyday lives.  The following questions will guide the class:

• What environmental problems arose in South Asia through accelerated economic development across the  20th century and early 21st century?
• Who suffered the most, why, and how were they affected, socially, culturally, and materially?
• What strategies for justice and sustainability emerged?
• How is environmental justice understood across activists, policymakers, and ordinary people whose lives are most in danger?

Co-listed with History 393-0-22

This seminar will focus on the 1947 Partition of British India to understand how this traumatic event has become paradigmatic for colonial India and post-colonial South Asia. The Partition created more than just the two rival nation-states of India and Pakistan from what used to be British India. It also generated a long shadow that continues to define ongoing regional conflicts such as those in Kashmir, continual anxieties about majoritarian and minoritarian identity politics viewed alternately with dread and jubilation in both India and Pakistan, and a persistent desire among South Asian creative artists to make sense of the pain of this violent event. How did the Partition come about? How have scholars, commentators, filmmakers, novelists, creative writers, and those who survived the violence of this event understood and narrativized it? Why does an event that occurred 75 years ago loom so large in the collective memory of South Asians today? To address these and other questions, this seminar will be divided into two parts, each based on a selected set of textual and visual materials. Part I will explore the long and complicated historiography of Partition, i.e., how Indian and Pakistani officials, historians, and scholars have written about Partition between the 1950s and contemporary times. Here we will read early accounts explaining how and why the Partition happened, in addition to exploring official narratives of Britain, India, and Pakistan about this event. Part II will focus on how Partition has been remembered beyond scholarly circles by filmmakers, novelists, and documentarians. Here, we will read and view a set of films, novels, and short stories to understand why Partition continues to be a deeply troubling subject for South Asians.

Co-listed with History 292-0-25

This seminar explores histories of the “campus” as a central geography of US settler colonialism. We will study the historical construction and histories of anticolonial movements on many forms of the campus—educational institutions (PWIs, HBCUs, Tribal colleges, boarding schools), military bases, religious institutes, museums, and corporate landholdings. By engaging with Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Asian American Studies, and Queer theoretical scholarship, we will study how structures of power and possibility are embedded in the landscape. Students will be encouraged to create a research project based on a campus of their choice, producing either a traditional paper, a digital project, a performance, or a public event. Class meetings will center on discussions of texts, films, and other documentary materials but will also include trips to sites around Evanston and Chicago, collaborative research sessions, and project workshops.

This class will count toward the NAIS Minor!

The United States is currently home to 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its incarcerated population. With more than 2.3 million people under the control of the American criminal legal system, the United States has more total people who are incarcerated than any other country in the world. Moreover, the United States has one of the most punitive approaches to criminal justice, imposing lengthy prison sentences, forcing people who are incarcerated to spend years—sometimes even decades—in solitary confinement, and providing very few educational, vocational, and recreational programs in prisons.

Punishment and incarceration also disproportionately impact people of color. Black Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites. While Black Americans and Hispanics make up about 32% of the US population, they constitute 56% of the incarcerated population.

This course will use a philosophical lens to examine the causes and consequences of this crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, along with possible solutions to it, with a particular emphasis on the theories of punishment grounding our criminal legal system and, thus, our prisons. The course will have a seminar-style format and will be held at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois. Enrollment will include both Northwestern students from the Evanston campus and students in the Northwestern Prison Education Program.

Co-listed with Anthropology 390-0-29

In this advanced undergraduate seminar and workshop, we will explore a range of creative works across media types and genre— audio/visual material (documentary and feature film, visual art, radio stories), memoir and fiction— to examine the political, ethical and social stakes of representing health, illness and disability. In particular, we will focus on the craft and composition of these works: what specific practices and techniques do these artists deploy, and to what end? What are the ethics and aesthetics of their representational practices? The course will also offer students the opportunity to focus on, develop, workshop and showcase their own creative health humanities projects, with ample space and time for critical reflection and feedback.

Co-listed with Political Science 390-0-21

In this course, we read closely the founding texts in Chinese political thought (in translation). We analyze their central concepts, arguments, and concerns and compare them to texts students might be familiar with from other traditions, including the Western tradition. We examine the ways in which the Chinese Classical texts—primarily the Confucian ones—have been used in recent years in intellectual debates, in China and in the West, about democracy, human rights, and global peace. We also touch on the ways these texts have been used by the Chinese government.

This course engages the performances of Black women on the US musical stage from 1900 to 1970, focusing on singer-actresses and their vocal sound. Under the capacious vaudeville tent or proscenium arch of musical theatre belting, how did the blues shouter’s sound influence the Broadway belter’s technique? How were these sounds carried forward by Black torch singers and character actresses, nightclub vocalists, television variety performers, and Black Broadway glamour girls? Drawing on the work of scholars Shane Vogel and Daphne Brooks,
we will read performers’ autobiographies as performance theory and understand Black women singers as skillful arrangers of sound–voice teachers whose varied “singing lessons” function as vibrant scenarios for performance analysis. Our studies will take seriously what Sissieretta Jones, Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Pearl Bailey, Juanita Hall, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, Leslie Uggams, and Eartha Kitt have had to say and teach about singing on the musical stage.

Co-listed with English 385-0-22

What does it mean to call something "cute"? How about "interesting," "zany," "#oddlysatisfying," or — reaching back into the past — "beautiful" or "sublime"? This course explores all these questions of aesthetic judgment through a sustained and in-depth reading of literary theorist Sianne Ngai's pathbreaking 2012 book Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Along the way we will read selections from authors writing in earlier periods (Kant, Lyotard) and major influences on Ngai (Marx, Cavell). We will also consider more recent and primarily internet-based categories of aesthetic judgment as well as possible alternatives to "judgment" (such as when art serves as a prop for self care, e.g., ambient music, reading done to facilitate falling asleep, etc.). This course is designed to appeal to students interested in reading and writing at the intersections of literature, art, philosophy, and mass culture in 20th- and 21st-century western cultures. It is also designed as one possible introduction to the broad field of writings often called "literary theory." To ground our discussions we will analyze a variety of artistic works across genres and media, including videogames (Katamari Damacy), literature (Tan Lin, Eula Biss), and experimental film and video (Takashi Murata, Cecelia Condit, Jennifer Proctor, Michael Snow).

Co-listed with ENGLISH 350-0-20

In nineteenth-century Britain, a transportation revolution forever altered how people move through the world. Although spurred in large part by technological innovations such as the advent of railway travel, this revolution also unfolded in the pages of newspapers, novels, and other literary texts. This course will explore how literature shaped meanings and experiences of travel across the nineteenth century. How did Romantic poetry help transform the mundane act of walking into a respected leisure activity (aka “hiking”)? How did Victorian novels help process the shock of railway travel? How did Black transatlantic writers give voice to diasporic experience within a predominantly white British literary marketplace? These questions will take us through the English countryside, along dark Victorian streets, and across the Atlantic, guided by authors including William and Dorothy Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, Mary Prince, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mary Seacole, and Bram Stoker. While exploring how nineteenth-century authors used representations of travel to grapple with pressing issues of their day, we will also consider the ongoing legacies of these issues in contemporary culture and lived experience. To that end, the course will include several short excursions in the Chicago/Evanston area.

Co-listed with Comparative Literary Studies 390-0-20 and Gender and Sexuality Studies 361-0-20

Emotions are integral to our lives and influence how we navigate the social worlds we inhabit. This course explores an emotion that is notoriously difficult to characterize—shame—as it manifests itself in literary and visual media in historical and contemporary culture. During the quarter, we will explore the concept of shame in contexts ranging from sexuality studies (transsexuality, #MeToo), to Black feminist theory (white supremacy), post/neo-colonial discourses (Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa), Holocaust and postcolonial studies (survivor guilt), and inequity (poverty and class struggle). We will discuss a variety of materials, selected from a variety of literary texts (J.M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, Nella Larsen, Primo Levi, Thomas Mann), essays (phenomenology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, cultural studies), film (Boys Don’t Cry, reality T.V.), and excerpts from political commissions (TRC in South Africa). Topics for discussion may include: How do we “read for” emotion/render emotion legible? What role do identity and identification (gender, race, class, religion, and sexuality) play in shame? Does shame differ from guilt (and why should this matter)? Can shame be political and a social force? Does shame have a history? Is shame a social or a private emotion; a bodily or a psychic reaction? We will pose these and other questions and search for answers to them during the course of the quarter.

Co-listed with Comparative Literary Studies 302-0-20

Law and its Discontents: Representations of Criminality in Literature and Film will explore the ways in which the figure of the criminal has been represented across national traditions throughout the 20th and 21st century, with a special focus in the Latin American region. By carefully examining aesthetic depictions of the “outlaw”—from the American “Cowboy” to the Argentinian “Gaucho"—this course will address not only the role that these figures have played in the construction of national identities, but will also explore their potential for unsettling our conceptions of lawfulness, institutional justice, and ultimately, of the nation itself. Thus, in analyzing written and visual cultural practices that revisit the figure of the criminal, this course will explore topics such as the relationship between legal order and violence, criminality and popular justice, as well as of the (out)law and civil society. Primary readings for this course will include works from Roberto Bolaño, J. L. Borges, Angela Davis, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Franz Kafka, and others.

Co-listed with Radio/TV/Film 376-0-20

This course will teach basic drawing and design skills to storytellers and humanities scholars. Participants will practice with both analog tools (drawing and collage) and digital tools (Photoshop and Illustrator) and learn to combine analog and digital tools to create static images for telling stories or communicating research. Course will be particularly useful for participants who would like to follow a path in animation, comics-graphic novels, design, photography, or cinematography. This course will also introduce a path for creating comics essays as an alternative to writing academic papers. Participants will keep a journal, make weekly design and drawing assignments, participate in critique sessions, and make an individual presentation about a design work. Final project may include a comics story, storyboard or a comics essay derived from research. No drawing or software skills required for taking this course, but participants must be willing to practice drawing through a range of assignments.