Spring 2022 Course Offerings

(also SPAN 4666/6666, LATA 4666/6666)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
Irina Troconis
Mondays, 12:25-2:20pm

Imagine the following: Thousands of pieces of bones from hundreds of bodies disappeared during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship filling Chile’s 1,600 km Atacama Desert. 75 million pages of Guatemala's secret police files describing (and thus indisputably proving) the horrors of the civil war, and decomposing—like paper cadavers—in a forgotten archive. The always-multiplying eyes of Venezuela’s dead president, Hugo Chávez, watching people’s comings and goings in the city from walls, billboards, hats, and t-shirts.

Latin America is brimming with the remains of fifty years of bloody dictatorships, armed conflicts, civil wars, and unfulfilled revolutions. These remains however do not stay quiet, nor do they stay still; they stubbornly haunt the contemporary social, political, economic, and cultural landscape of countries such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Mexico, challenging lineal temporalities, familiar spaces, and the comfort of stable and official narratives of memory.

In this course, we will explore the spectral afterlives of these remains by discussing a multi- and interdisciplinary corpus that includes fiction, film, performance, and photography, as well as graffiti, souvenirs, holograms and internet memes. We will analyze how, in these works and objects, the specters of Latin America’s recent and distant pasts acquire visibility and social and political power, and how they become compelling forces that, in some cases, unsettle and denounce the violence of the state, and in others, ground and strengthen it. We will also put these specters in dialogue with contemporary global phenomena such as the reemergence of populism and nationalism, the development and popularization of social media and new technologies, the migration crisis, and the urgency of climate change discourses. In the process, we will consider how spectrality brings not only times but also spaces and bodies together, and invites a reflection on the possibility of an ethics of global care and responsibility. This course will be taught in English.

Irina R. Troconis is Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies. She holds a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from NYU, and an MPhil Degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge (UK). Her areas of specialization include: Memory Studies, Venezuelan Studies, Politics and Performance, Affect Theory, and Digital Humanities. Her book project, Spectral Remains: Memory, Affect, and the State in the Afterglow of Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, explores through the lens of spectrality the memory narratives and practices developed around the figure of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in the seven years following his death. She is also working on two new research projects. The first examines the performance work of Venezuelan artists in the diaspora. The second explores how digital technologies shape and intervene in the articulation of narratives of memory in contemporary works of Latin American fiction, film, and performance. Her research has been published in Revista Iberoamericana, The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, Trópico Absoluto, and Latin American Research Review. She is co-editor of the digital volume Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience (2019, HemiPress) and co-organizer of the virtual conversation series (Re)pensando a Venezuela. 

(also MUSIC 4667/6667, STS 4667/6667)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
María Zuazu
Tuesdays, 11:20am-1:15pm

Sonic Remains investigates how music/sound are mobilized to negotiate the passage of time, as well as how, by enduring and being retrieved through bodies, objects, and media formats, they seem to challenge the pastness of the past. Emphasis is placed on the materialities of musical and auditory practices as these implicate technologies and techniques, economy and culture, and ultimately participate in larger political ecologies in which we, too, are enmeshed.

This course familiarizes students with key aspects of the material culture of music and of sonic media, as well as with questions that animate critical thinking about the presence and futurity of the past. In addition to scholarship, we will consider how work by a range of artists intervenes in these questions. Students will acquire critical tools to analyze a range of objects (e.g., instruments, LPs) from different perspectives (e.g., as cultural commodities, as artifacts, as loci for embedded and embodied memories, as waste) and will test these, and formulate their own questions in research/creative projects.

Topics include sonic memorials and digital archives, the work of audio records and the human voice as evidence of the (recent) past, sonic media’s contribution to electronic waste, audio reenactments and revivals in living history, knowledge-production, and performance practices.   

María Edurne Zuazu works in music, sound, and media studies, and researches the intersections of material culture and sonic practices in relation to questions of cultural memory, social and environmental justice, and the production of knowledge in the West during the 20th and 21st centuries. María has presented on topics ranging from sound and multimedia art and obsolete musical instruments, to aircraft sound and popular music. Her essays on telenovela, militarized uses of sound, music and historical memory, and music videos have appeared in Latin American Music Review, Women & Music, and edited volumes about Spanish popular music and new audiovisual media. She received her undergraduate degree from the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, Barcelona, and her PhD in Music from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, where she also completed the Film Studies Certificate Program. María has been the recipient of Fulbright and Fundación La Caixa fellowships. 

(also ASRC 4668/6668, FGSS 4668/6668, LSP 4668/6668)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
Yomaira Figueroa
Tuesdays, 12:25-2:20pm

This seminar will examine the theoretical, critical, and practical methods necessary for the identification and interpretation of archives through the lenses of Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-diasporic afterlives. We will discuss traditional, nontraditional, and radical archives, the study and collection of alternative archival materials, and various forms of archival refusal and disappearance. This transdisciplinary seminar will traverse theory, poetics, photography, film, and digital cultures to bring fore the precarity and urgency of the quotidian in the wake of slavery, colonialism, and racialization. The course will engage Afro-Latinx/Afro-diasporic studies, decolonial feminisms, sexuality, and theories of the human that impact our approach to archives and often-overlooked histories. Students will curate an anthology and produce digital projects with the aim of communal outreach and engagement.

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English, Puerto Rican and Hispanic Caribbean Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is Associate Professor of Afro-Diaspora Studies at Michigan State University and the author of Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern, 2020). Her forthcoming book, Archive of Disappearances: Afterimages of Afro-Puerto Ricans at the Edges of Empire, examines the disappearances and excesses of Afro-Puerto Rican island and diasporic peoples through the study of archival histories, photography, visual art, and film from the late 19thcentury to the present. Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO, Small Axe, Frontiers, Hispanofilia, Post 45 Contemporaries, and SX Salon. She is a founder of the MSU Womxn of Color Initiative, #ProyectoPalabrasPR, and Electric Marronage and is a 2015-2017 Duke University Mellon Mays SITPA Fellow, a 2017-2018 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and a 2021-2022 Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow. A first-generation high-school and college graduate, Dr. Figueroa is passionate about mentoring underrepresented and first-generation students and leads the MSU Mentoring Underrepresented Scholars in English Program (MUSE) which seeks to advise and recruit promising prospective Ph.D. students in an effort to shift the discipline and study of English. Dr. Figueroa teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the department of English and the African American & African Studies and Chicano/Latino Studies Programs.  

(also AMST 4669/6669, ASRC 4669/6669,  HIST 4669/6669)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
Leslie Alexander
Thursdays, 12:25-2:20pm

In recent years, there has been growing public awareness that mass incarceration has its roots in slavery and that racial bias infects all aspects of our criminal injustice system. However, our nation has yet to reckon with the reality that our systems of policing and mass criminalization have histories rooted in white fear—not merely of Black people, or even Black resistance, but of the very notion of Black freedom. Therefore, this course explores the legacy of slavery in modern-day policing and mass incarceration. More specifically, it examines how slave uprisings throughout the Americas led fearful and vengeful whites to terrorize Black people and to establish a network of laws, policies and social practices that laid a durable foundation for systems of racial and social control that continue to exist in modified forms today. Using an array of sources—including film, legal codes, government documents, oral histories, newspaper reports, and personal letters—this course explores the legacy of slavery in modern-day policing and mass incarceration.

The course begins in the colonial era, with a thorough exploration of early British laws regarding slavery and slave control. In particular, it examines the creation of legal codes that clearly equated whiteness with freedom and Blackness with “unfreedom.” It also discusses the early creation of slave patrols and the growing fear of slave rebellion throughout the colonies—a fear that substantially expanded after conspiracies in New York and South Carolina, and eventually led to horrific violence and repressive legal restrictions. The course then explores how the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent rebellions it inspired prompted widespread panic among whites in the United States and caused white governmental authorities to enact increasingly despotic laws. Creating a precedent for state policing and social control that would haunt future generations of Black people in America, state and federal authorities implemented a complex web of legal codes, patrols, and state militias that monitored and governed Black people’s lives in sickening detail, ensuring that whites were empowered to use all means—legal and extralegal—to control Black lives. The course concludes with a detailed examination of contemporary policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration.

Leslie Alexander is Associate Professor in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. A specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history, she received her B.A. from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Dr. Alexander’s research focuses on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Black culture, political consciousness, and resistance movements. Her first monograph, entitled African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861, explores Black culture, identity, and political activism during the early national and antebellum eras. She is also the co-editor of “We Shall Independent Be:” African American Place-Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States, the Encyclopedia of African American History, and is the author of the widely read op-ed piece, “The Birth of a Nation is an Epic Fail,” which appeared in The Nation. Dr. Alexander’s second monograph, “Fear of a Black Republic: African Americans, Haiti, and the Birth of Black Internationalism” is an exploration of African American foreign policy during the nineteenth century and it is forthcoming with the University of Illinois Press. Her newest research project, “How We Got Here: Slavery and the Making of the Modern Police State,” examines how surveillance of free and enslaved Black communities in the colonial and antebellum eras laid the foundation for modern-day policing. During her career, she has won several significant awards including the coveted University Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and the University Distinguished Diversity Enhancement Award at Ohio State University.
 

(also ANTHR 4470/7470, ASRC 4670/6670, STS 4670/6670)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
Noah Tamarkin
Thursdays, 2:40-4:35pm

This course takes up a key feature of DNA: as a scientific object, a bodily object, a cultural object, a social object, a legal object, and a political object, it blends temporalities, inviting us to reimagine the proximity of past and future. The three key concepts that animate the course are race, justice, and afterlives. Our starting point is afterlives, which we will initially approach through the work of Saidiya Hartman, with additional readings by Stuart Hall, Christina Sharpe, Asli Zengin, and Ruha Benjamin. Here we will consider what afterlives opens up as a temporal space through which race and justice might converge. Next, carrying forward with how an attention to afterlives attunes us to questions of race and justice, we will consider the temporal work of DNA through three genetic temporalities: the past as imagined through ancestry and “genetic history”; the immediacies of colliding pasts and presents through humanitarian forensic genetics and criminal forensic genetics; and the possibilities and promises of genetic futures, with a focus on race and genetic medicine, ethics of genetic research, and decolonizing genetic knowledge.

Noah Tamarkin is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University and a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. His research examines how DNA transforms power and politics as it becomes unevenly part of everyday life through technologies like ancestry testing and criminal forensics. His book, Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa (Duke University Press 2020), ethnographically examines the politics of race, religion, and recognition among Lemba people, Black South Africans who were part of Jewish genetic ancestry studies in the 1980s and 1990s. The book asks how the stakes of genetic data change when approached from the perspective of research subjects rather than genetics researchers. His work has also appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, History and Anthropology, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. At Cornell, he teaches courses that explore race and religion; borders and belonging; policing, carcerality and abolition; biology and society; and the temporalities of genetics.  

Spring. 1 credit.
Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz

In this studio class, we combine (Afro)Latinx dance forms such as cumbia, reggaeton, capoeira, and bachata with modern dance, contact improvisation, floor work, release technique, and hip hop. As we move and create, we will learn the histories of these dance forms. We will explore new fusions across these genres without unmooring each one from their original context. The class will culminate in a showing open to the public. No experience necessary.

Dr. Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz’s research is at the intersection of critical dance studies, illegality and citizenship, and (Afro)Latinx/Latin American experiences. He’s a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2020-2022) in the Society for the Humanities and an incoming assistant professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. He’s the former managing director of San Francisco’s Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers. He is also a choreographer and professional dancer whose work has been presented internationally.

Spring. 4 credits. 

SEM 101: Energy (K. Pinkus) - Also COML 2750, ENGL 2950, GOVT 2755 

This course has two main goals: 1) To introduce students to the humanities, broadly speaking: methods, ideas, possibilities for thought and practice in literature, history, philosophy, art history, critical theory, anthropology, media studies; 2)  To focus on the question of energy in various senses. We will move back and forth between these two aims. We will make site visits to Cornell’s Combined heat and cooling plant and to the Cornell solar farm and hydropower facility and to the Kroch Rare Book and Manuscripts Library. We will view films and we will read several novels as well as short stories, historical accounts of fossil fuels and philosophical essays on the nature of energy. We will also consider art works that engage with energy. This course is open to all students who are curious about thinking energy as a complex problem and want to learn why the humanities are crucial and timely.

SEM 102: The Afterlife of the Roman Landscape (K. Tally-Schumacher) - Also ARTH 2750, CLASS 2750 

This course investigates how the Romans understood the natural world, the ways in which they altered the landscape, and how those changes impacted later societies. Topics to be explored include: ancient pollution and deforestation; the entanglement between working the land and enslavement in the Roman era and the impact of this relationship on later cultures; the influence of Roman landscape design and horticulture on later cultures such as Islamic, Renaissance, and Colonial gardens; and the legacy of Roman methods of surveying land in the US and specifically in Upstate New York.  

SEM 103: Environmental Justice in Upstate NY (M. Reynolds) - Also AMST 2751, ASRC 2750, ENGL 2950

How might we work toward the intersection of environmental justice and racial justice locally in Ithaca? In this course, we will examine the voices of environmental activists of color working on sustainable farming and environmental issues right here in Upstate New York, such as Leah Penniman and Robin Wall Kimmerer. We will partner with the Ithaca-based nonprofit, Khuba International, to develop content for their Farming for Freedom Trail initiative, an app that promotes BIPOC farmers in Tompkins County.

(also GREEK 3120/5130)
Spring. 4 credits.
Mathura Umachandran.

Prerequisite: one 2000-level Greek course. Undergraduate seminar in Greek. Topic: Euripides, Alcestis.

Mathura Umachandran is a classicist by training. Her work is committed to tracing the development of the methods and ideological forms of Classics in the post war Humanities and, thus, how Classics operates in contemporary culture in collaboration with systems of power. She wrote her dissertation in the department of Classics at Princeton University (2018) and comes to the Society for the Humanities after a post-doctoral position on the Anachronism and Antiquity project at the University of Oxford (2018–2019) and a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Classical Studies, London (2019–2020). She has recently co-edited a special issue on ‘Anachronism’ in Classical Receptions Journal (2020), in addition to articles on Iris Murdoch’s reception of Aeschylus, the conceptual history of ‘World Literature’, and public facing essays that addressed Classics as a racialized form of knowledge-making.  At Cornell, Mathura will be working on her first book, ‘Critical Mythologies: Classical Reception and the Frankfurt School’, which explores how the first generation of Critical Theorists made turns to Greco-Roman myth, seeking intellectual resources beyond enlightened reason. ‘Critical Mythologies’ examines how Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse not only exploded the cultural value of antiquity itself by revising the concept of ‘myth’ in various ways, but also how they deployed specific narratives (the usual philosophical suspects Oedipus and Odysseus, as well as the less obvious candidates Narcissus and Orpheus) as openings for theorizing new political horizons of knowledge-making about the subject and her relations with the world.

(also ANTHR 3950, ASIAN 3347, NES 3750)
Spring. 4 credits.
Durba Ghosh.

This course is a seminar studying the practice, theory, and methodology of humanities research, critical analysis, and communication through writing and oral presentation.  The goal of the seminar is to teach and refine research methods (library research, note taking, organizing material, bibliographies, citation methods, proposals, outlines, etc.) as well as to guide students through the initial stages of a research project of your own design. See the full description on the Humanities Scholars Program website. 

(also COML 4008, ENGL 4928, NES 4008)
Spring. 4 credits.
Eman Ghanayem.

In recent years, scholars in Indigenous studies, Black studies, Asian American studies, Latinx studies, and Arab American studies have discussed variant dispossessions that influence their own cultural contexts and implicate the United States and the world at large. This course brings critical concerns in comparative ethnic studies to the field of comparative literature to study the patterns that underlie the former and their insights about national violence, race and racism, and contemporary forms of social control and marginalization. The course’s secondary purpose is to craft “relationality,” a theory of cultural and geographic relatability, as a comparative methodology that illuminates the similarities and affinities between Indigenous, refugee, and people of color narratives. In-class discussions and assignments, students will rehearse a relational analysis as they connect the assigned readings to each other while crafting overarching observations about the dispossessive and exclusionary nature of the nation-state today.

Eman Ghanayem is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society for the Humanities and the Department of Comparative Literature. Prior to coming to Cornell, Ghanayem was the 2020-2021 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She earned her Ph.D. in English, with minor degrees in American Indian Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies, from UIUC. Her research spans the areas of Indigenous studies, comparative ethnic studies, and transnational gender and women’s studies. Towards a global theory of belonging, and its confluences under colonial conditions, Ghanayem’s research addresses the relationship between natives, settlers, and refugees in both “new” and “old” world contexts. Her first book project, Nations without Nationalisms: On Palestinian and American Indian Literary Imaginations, argues that indigeneity, as expressed in American Indian and Palestinian literatures, offers a necessary critique of (settler) nationalism as a product of the colonial west, as well as represents an alternative form of homemaking that is land-oriented, relational, and can function without a state. Ghanayem authored a piece on Palestinian American Activist Rasmea Odeh in Women’s Studies Quarterly (2019) and co-edited a special issue in Transmotion titled “Native American Narratives in a Global Context” (2019). She is currently working on forthcoming publications in Amerasia and the Routledge Companion to Refugee Narratives. Ghanayem taught a wide range of courses in the Department of English at Birzeit University in the West Bank and the Departments of English, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

(also MUSIC 7356)
Spring. 4 credits.
Bamba Ndiaye.

The recent deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor sparked a global protest movement for social justice and against police brutality. Beyond the US, these events also fostered a stronger sense of agency among social movements in the Black Atlantic (Africa and the Diaspora) many of which are demanding more accountability from power establishments, the dismantling of systemic racism and colonial legacies as well as the implementation of antiracist policies. How do these movements come into existence? What challenges are they facing? How do they impact the societies in which they evolve? How do social movements mobilize resources for mass action? This course examines the causes of the rise of contemporary social insurgencies in the Black Atlantic and their effects in the sociopolitical environments. It also explores the tools social activists use to confront the power establishment, such as music, social media and street protests. In addition to providing a deep analysis of social movement theories, this course will examine the intersections of age, class, gender, race, gender through several case studies from various countries, including #BLM in the United States, #FeesMustFall in South Africa, #RhodesMustFall in Britain, and Y en a marre in Senegal.

Bamba Ndiaye is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society for the Humanities and the Music Department. He received his PhD in Comparative Humanities with a concentration in Culture Criticism and Contemporary Thought at the University of Louisville where he also taught classes including Social Movements in the Black Atlantic, Creativity & the Arts, Intro to Pan-African Studies and French, among others. His research interests focus on protest movements in the Black Atlantic, Pan-Africanism, soundscapes of social protests, Black popular cultures, and postcolonial theory. He is the author of several published and forthcoming peer-reviewed articles and book chapters including “African American Evangelic Missions and Social Reforms in the Congo,” “Hip-Hop, Civic Awareness and Anti-Establishment Politics in Senegal,” and “Social Movements and the Challenges of Resources Mobilization in the Digital Era.” As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell, Bamba will be working on his book project entitled Black Social Movement and Digital Technology. Using the Y en a marre movement in Senegal as a case study, this project examines how social movement in Francophone West Africa are spearheading a renaissance of Pan-Africanism which he calls “Neo Pan-Africanism”. His project also delves into the use of digital technology, music, and social media as means for contemporary African social activists to foster transatlantic connections and racial solidarity, and to coordinate mass actions against power establishments in the Black Atlantic. His secondary project investigates the use of digital technology and music streaming platforms in the production and commercialization of Francophone West African hip hop. Bamba is the recipient of the 2018 Barbara Harlow Prize for Excellence in Graduate Research at the Annual Africa Conference at the University of Texas. He is also is also recipient of the Roberson Fund for Research in African Studies as well as winner of the Anne Braden Social Justice Paper Award at the University of Louisville. He is the creator and host of The Africanist, an academic podcast that investigates historical and contemporary issues in the Black Atlantic.

(also ARCH 6408, AMST 6809, ASRC 6819, ENGL 6919)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.
Enrollment limited to fellowship recipients: apply by November 15.
Mondays, 2:40-4:25 p.m.
4 credits.

Topic for Spring 2022: Seeing to Be in the Aftermath

In 1964, in the aftermath of a riot, June Jordan wrote to Buckminster Fuller, proposing a collaborative architectural redesign of Harlem as a way, she wrote, “to save me from the hatred I felt.” In this seminar—grounding our study in works such as June Jordan’s New Days: Poems of Exile and Return, Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca and In Montgomery, Nikki Finney’s Rice, and Sonia Sanchez’s Does Your House Have Lions—let’s think through the ways poets figure a correspondence between dreamscape and realscape, envisioning and interpreting the spaces we’re meant to inhabit. How do we read cities, houses, communities? Where and how do we learn these reading practices? How do these poems help us develop theories of place? How are emotional connections to place limned and how do poets help us see to be habitable worlds? In “The Second Sermon on the Warpland” Brooks insists we “know the whirlwind is our commonwealth.” Visualizing the vector fields suggested in these poems, what methods might we find for living, nevertheless? How do we move within and between conceptual experiments we walk through every day? How do experiments like the Tattoo Project in Detroit, MI, Lexington, KY and Boulder, CO speak to the ways community identity construction is entangled with poetic measure? Let’s think through the math and the aftermath. Our approach will be experimental, interdisciplinary, and emergent. Bring what you’re working on and let’s see how our projects intersect. Other texts may include Jen Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play and the Orion Magazine anthology Old Growth.

The course will include introduction to digital tools as well as integration of student research with collections available at the Rare and Distinctive Collections in Cornell Library and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum. Students will have the resources to develop innovative methodologies (curated collections, digital tools, video essays, etc.), and will be able to work on material or a location connected to their own interests as they investigate and imagine urban possibilities.