2020

The “Race, Gender, Sexualities, and Social Movements” group examines how our view of “modernity” changes when seen through the lenses of race, gender, and sexuality– precisely the perspectives that have been excluded from foundational accounts of modernity, such as those by Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Krishna Kumar. We discussed Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, noting its argument that, for proletarian women, European modernity did not necessarily bring “progress.” We discussed the sculpture A Subtlety by Kara Walker, looking at how this provocative work, installed in the former Domino Sugar factory in 2014, embodies intersections of race and gender.  Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney Mintz informed our analysis. We considered contemporary BLM protest movements and demands for the removal of monuments as expressions of the breaking points of modernity and its internal contradictions. We read Bruno Latour’s We Have Never been Modern and drew on The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy to rethink the notions of “pollution and impurity” that rise from the dominance of “ethnic absolutism.” Building on these discussions, our current projects include an OER module on Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, short videos/OER modules on relevant social movements that we will share with each other for our courses, guest lecturing in each other’s courses with future plans (pending administrative approval) to team-teach, an article on asylum and the aesthetics of protest in Kivu Ruhorahoza’s film Europa: Based on a True Story, a proposal for a General Education course on “The Politics of Color,” and the revision of the Integrative Studies course “Social Justice and the Image” to include more global perspectives.

The “Ecologies, Commodity Chains, and Foodways” working group assembles two paths: environmental problems and the issues of commodity chains. Common themes and ideas of the group include environmental degradation and eco-catastrophe, the extraction and circulations of commodities such as silver, gold, oil, water, rubber, abalone, meat, lapis lazuli, seeds and superfoods as well as related issues of human rights, migrant labor, bio-piracy, fair trade value chains, the feminization of labor, colonization, de-peasantization,  food sovereignty, and resistance.

The group collectively contemplates the following questions: What language do we use when we talk about nature and humans’ relationship to the natural world? What role do modernist aesthetics and other histories play in our understanding of them? What is the relationship between environmental politics and tradition? What are the cultural lives of commodities in different geographies? Where does the tourist industry stand among extractive practices? What ideas of cosmopolitan consumption do the selected commodities produce? How can we apply decolonial methodologies in our thinking about the natural world, extractive practices, and the circulation of commodities?

The projects of the group are comprised of course planning and creating curricular materials. The faculty and the graduate students from various disciplines enhance the interdisciplinary discussions of the selected commodities. The group aims to create one or two-week modules on each commodity and issue by including historical background, theoretical readings, and artistic/literary works for discussion.

This working group brought together people interested in a wide array of topics—everything from road-building in the colonial Caribbean and Africa to surveillance technologies on the U.S./Mexico border to the circulation of cell phones recordings of acts of violence committed by the police. Perhaps not surprisingly, the possibilities and limitations of Zoom for both teaching and exchanges such as the Redesigning Modernities workshop was also a recurring topic. 

Early on in our discussions the issue of temporality emerged as a key issue around which many of our concerns revolved, and we frequently returned to the issue of how technologies and infrastructures are bound up in ideas about futurity and obsolescence. Among the many questions we considered were: How do particular technologies become racialized? In what sense can large-scale infrastructure projects such as dams or stadiums take on aesthetic qualities, and how has infrastructure functioned in both colonial and anti-colonial projects? How does the notion of infrastructure complicate an older Marxist distinction between the superstructure and base? What insight can theater-based concepts of set design and the Brechtian “apparatus” offer into discussions of technology and infrastructure? The shared readings we found especially fruitful were Brian Larkin’s “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure”; Raymond William’s “Dominant, Emergent, and Residual”; Wendy Chun’s “Big Data as Drama”; and Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory.”  

Some of our group’s projects included a syllabus for an undergraduate Comparative Literature course on “Stories of Infrastructure and the Built Environment”;  an OER module on monster movies and modernity; and contributions to an essay on the 2008 film Sleep Dealer analyzed through the lens of Wendy Chun’s “Big Data as Drama.”