Contents
- 1 Download “Roots and Rhythms of the Luso-Afro-Brazil World” Syllabus Here
- 2 Download “Photography, Race, Genocide” Syllabus Here
- 3 Download “The Politics of Color” Syllabus Here
- 4 Download “Where I Come From, What I Stand On” Syllabus Here
- 5 Download “Social Justice and the Image” Syllabus Here
- 6 Download “War/Industry/Optics in German Literature, Film, and Culture” Syllabus Here
- 7 Download “Stories of Infrastructure and the Built Environment” Syllabus Here
- 8 DOWNLOAD “Honors Rhetoric and Composition” HERE…
Syllabus Archive
The below syllabi were created by participants in the 2020 Redesigning Modernities Workshop, and may be used by instructors at Penn State or beyond to develop courses and curricula.
Roots and Rhythms of the Luso-Afro-Brazilian World
Created by Krista Brune
Course designed for Undergraduate Students; General Education
This course serves as an introduction to Luso-Afro-Brazilian culture and history by identifying and tracing transatlantic and global connections within the Portuguese-speaking world from Portugal’s maritime empire during the “Age of Discovery” through the contemporary moment. Identifying and defining linguistic, cultural, and national “roots” (raízes in Portuguese) has long been a preoccupation of Portuguese, Brazilian, and Lusophone African intellectuals and artists. By departing from this concept of roots, the class underscores the history of the Portuguese-speaking world as enmeshed in global networks, beginning with Portugal’s colonial expansion fueled by resource extraction and the transatlantic slave trade, responsible for the forced migration of millions of Africans to Brazil and other parts of the Americas, and continuing with acts of colonialization, immigration, emigration, and political repression since the late nineteenth century.
The roots of the Lusophone world in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas generate syncopated rhythms that involve hybridization. As a musical process and a metaphor, syncopation contributes to material and theoretical conceptions of Portugal, Brazil, and Lusophone Africa as sites of cultural and linguistic encounters that necessitate acts of translation and processes of transculturation. An attention to intersections of roots and rhythms invites us to think about forms of resistance in political, social, economic, and cultural realms. Through a historically grounded study of Luso-Afro-Brazilian literature, music, film, and visual art, this class examines how the idea of imperial, national, cultural, and linguistic roots have been activated in moments of resistance. In doing so, the course traces a trajectory of the Portuguese-speaking world from its transatlantic origins in colonialism, enslavement of and colonial expansion and the trade of enslaved persons to its current status as a global community connected by language and interlinked histories yet dispersed across distinct nations and continents.
This course explores the role of photography in the context of the racialized politics of genocides and their aftermaths. The course aims to critically examine photographic evidence of genocidal violence, revealing the long shadow of modern genocides from colonialism, to the Holocaust, the Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan genocides, to the present. At the intersection of modern constructs of race as they culminate in genocidal violence, the course investigates the political and ethical potential of photography. Topics include: the spectrality of photography and its origins (W. Benjamin, Barthes, Sontag, Batchen); the civil contract of photography (Azoulay); atomic light (Lippit); studies in black and white (Sheehan); constructs of race (Bernasconi, Moten); modern genocides (Kiernan); memory’s edge and after-images (Young, Didi-Huberman); photography in film and literature: Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais); Ararat (Egoyan), The Photographer (Jablonski), Austerlitz (Sebald); The Missing Picture (Penh); multidirectional memory (Rothberg). Please note that this is a graduate seminar.
This seminar explores the politics and aesthetics of color in visual and literary media. Whether associated with particular moods or mental states (“red with anger,” “pale white”), with particular ideologies (Communist red, the environmental Greens) or with particular races (black for African Americans, white for Caucasians, red for Native Americans, yellow for Asians), color has always been seen as an index of meaning. Yet the broad cultural significance of specific colors has rarely been addressed. Reduced to its symbolic – that is, highly conventionalized – function, color is typically understood as a fixed system of reference that is easily decoded. However, this approach to color obscures its dynamic nature, its culturally conditioned ambiguities and dualities. “Every hue, real or imagined, bodes a world,” writes Jeffery Cohen in his introduction to Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green (2013) and it is in the vibrant worlds of colors that climate changes, both politically and ecologically; that movements gain energy (from “Black Panther” to the “Yellow People Revolution”); and constructions of the color of skin, contaminants, plants, atmospheres are built. Readings and viewings include Goethe’s Color Theory, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Kieslowski’s Color Trilogy, Kurosawa’s Ran and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing – to look at perspectives that recognize the complex nature of color and its inscriptions in political networks. Please note that this is a graduate seminar.
Where I Come from, What I Stand On: Stories of Displacement and Migration in World Literature and Film
Created by Jutta Gsoels-Lorensen, Janet Neigh, Tembi Charles, and Ibis Sierra Audivert
Course designed for Undergraduate Students; General Education
Pushing against the currently prevalent rhetoric of crisis and its amnesiac disposition, this course explores global situations of displacement from historical, intersectional, juridico-political, social, affective, and imaginative perspectives. Our collection of suggested class materials, comprised of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, film, visual art, and theoretical writings, is designed to unmoor predominant conceptions and iconographies of migrancy and challenge students to think beyond the nation-state framework to identify longstanding structural iniquities and their past and present global maps. Given our location, we also focus on place and displacement in the Pennsylvania context. Our aim is to sustain a class discussion exploring a world that moves while simultaneously challenging students to assume their place within it, actively and responsively.
Social Justice and the Image
Created by MaryEllen Higgins
Course designed for Undergraduate Students; General Education
“Social Justice and the Image” introduces students to a variety of critical approaches to images of social justice, and investigates how these images are connected to social movements, protests, community-building, perceptual shifts, and rights-building. The course prompts students to reflect upon image-making in a variety of social justice contexts; to study the variety of public claims made upon these images; and to explore interdisciplinary texts about social justice. Course objectives include integrative thinking (the ability to synthesize knowledge from multiple domains such as fine arts, film studies, rhetoric, and philosophy); social responsibility and ethical reasoning (the ability to comprehend ethical issues in diverse settings); and critical and analytical thinking (the ability to conceptualize, apply, and analyze images in local, national, and global settings).
War/Industry/Optics in German Literature, Film, and Culture
Created by Hannah A. Matangos
Course designed for Undergraduate Students; General Education
This course surveys German literature, film, and culture from World War I to the present day, with a special focus on the effects of technological development on human perception. Industrialization and mechanization changed our relationship to labor, art, and war, fostering laments, critiques – and celebrations – from artists and thinkers from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich to today. How do new technologies affect the way we see and engage the world around us? How are these changing perceptual modes reflected in art, literature, film, graphic novels, and even video games? What can we learn about our own daily acts of viewing and media consumption by tracing these histories?
In addition to looking at the German context, this course pays attention to international connections, given the increasingly networked flows of knowledge and technologies since the beginning of the 20th century, coupled with the growth of the military-industrial complex. This course will be conducted in English, with optional reading opportunities in German for German speakers.
Stories of Infrastructure and the Built Environment
Created by Sarah J. Townsend and Janet Neigh
Course designed for Undergraduate Students; General Education
Pipes, cables, and paved roads form the fabric of modern life, yet we seldom notice infrastructure after it is constructed and unveiled–unless it malfunctions. In this course, we will read literary texts and view films that bring attention to the built environment and to the unevenness of infrastructure around the globe. We will consider how the building of roads, railroad tracks, and dams often define what it means to be modern. Studying such topics as the Panama Canal and the more recent Three Gorges Dam in China, students will be invited to reflect on how feats of engineering have figured in the popular imagination and what such fantasies obscure about the reality of these projects, especially for the people who directly experience them. At the same time we will consider the ways in which people construct smaller-scale, “everyday infrastructure” in order to give shape to their lives and intervene in the world around them.
Infrastructure has mainly been studied in STEM fields and more recently in cultural anthropology. In this course, we will consider what literary and cinematic representation offer to the field. Some of the questions that we will explore include: How do we define progress and what counts as modern? What does infrastructure reveal about the relationship between public and private space? What can we learn about the history of imperialism through the lens of infrastructure? What impact does infrastructure have on the environment? How do gender, race, and sexuality determine one’s access and experience of infrastructure?
Honors Rhetoric and Composition: Investigating the History of Stories
Created by Daniela Farkas and Sharon M. Gallagher
Honors Rhetoric and Composition introduces students to the art of reading, writing, and communication. Students will analyze and produce visual, verbal, and written materials according to the traditional study of rhetoric that began in ancient civilizations and continues to the present day.
DOWNLOAD “Honors Rhetoric and Composition” HERE…
French Colonization and its Consequences through Texts, Films and Art
Syllabus created by Syllabus created by Frédérique Marty and Timothée Valentin
This course will introduce students to French Colonization through texts, film, and art by examining three different but interrelated historical periods: the first colonial empire (1534-1946), the second colonial empire (1830 to 1962), and the after-independence Francophone world. We will start by analyzing the circumstances that made European colonization possible, and how the colonial project was intertwined with the construction of French identity vis a vis the “other” and the French nation-state. Particular attention will be paid to the Slave Trade and the Black Code in the Caribbean Islands controlled by France.
In addition, we will look at the contradictions of the French Enlightenment in relation to colonization and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Common belief holds that the Enlightenment was a period when Europe considered that the “light of reason and the natural sciences would eventually dispel the shadows and darkness of superstition (religion) and political tyranny” (Macey:2000,260). This period ushered in what today we call modernity. However, as we shall explore in class through the second colonial empire and present-day French politics, modernity did not deliver emancipation for all. On the contrary, as the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas points out, modernity remains an unfinished project. In fact, the grand narrative of modernity has evolved into the post-capitalist society we currently live in.
To further understand the genesis of modern-day France and the Francophone World, we will explore how elites created the ideology of the “civilizing mission” for France to build and expand its second colonial empire mainly in North Africa, West and Equatorial Africa and Indochina. Turning our attention to the second colonial empire will allow us to become familiar with The Indigenat Code – a set of laws to regulate the status of colonial subjects- and its violent aftermath, particularly in Algeria.
Finally, we will focus on the French colonial army during WWI and WWI leading to decolonization movements in various parts of the world such as in Indochina and Algeria. The last part of the course will also be devoted to discussing the consequences of colonization in both France and the Francophone World. By examining the initial movements towards liberation in the Francophone world, we will understand the transition from colony to a sovereign state. As a class, we will also explore the trauma(s) associated with colonialism, wars of liberation, and how the legacy of colonialism is present in everyday life (displacement and immigration). By mapping the (neo)-colonial relationship between France and some of its former colonies today, we will uncover the reasons why current French politics rejects the teaching of Post-Colonial Studies at all levels of education.
For this course, the students will be asked to engage with important films and paintings depicting the ideas, the process, and the consequences of French colonization during different time periods. To analyze artistic and cultural productions, students will acquire appropriate vocabulary. Moreover, students will engage with theoretical and literary texts and will learn how to interpret and analyze them. Those texts will expose students to different ideas, ways of living, and values. Finally, this course will help students gain knowledge on the Francophone world and cultures around the world and how those cultures are interconnected and influence each other.
Lived Experiences of Incarceration
Syllabus created by Mary Zaborskis and Eileen Ahlin
Mass incarceration has been the de facto punishment in the US since the 1970s; each year more than 2 million people–adults and children–are housed in jails, prisons, or other detention centers. There is much discussion about persons who experience incarceration from the perspective of the criminal justice system. Equally, if not more, important is the lived experience of incarceration. This interdisciplinary course bridges the Humanities and Social Sciences to provide students with a deep understanding of the persons who experienced incarceration from their perspective, with attention to issues of age, gender, sexuality, race, class, and disability. We will examine a range of social scientific, historical, literary, and visual materials that invite us to consider the development of carceral institutions in the US and their effects–psychological, physical, spiritual, sociopolitical–on persons impacted by incarceration. This course meets an integral part of the undergraduate course: learning how different fields and areas of study overlap and bodies of knowledge integrate to make meaningful connections.
Download “The Lived Experience of Incarceration” HERE…
Cotton: Stitching Together Modernity
Syllabus created by Alex Lubin, Professor of African American Studies
This course traces the growth of cotton as a global commodity and product of a global labor force. In the early 1800s British textile manufacturers began to replace their textile machines cotton instead of wool, launching a global search for cotton crops, cheap labor, and markets for cotton products. By the 1850s, cotton was one of the most valuable commodities in the Atlantic world. Because of cotton’s value, American farmers demanded fertile territories where they could grow cotton, using unfree enslaved labor. As a result of the international market for cotton, the United State expanded its territory into what is today that U.S. Southeast. Plantations developed in newly acquired land was worked by enslaved African American labor and the removal, often by force, of Native and indigenous communities. On the eve of the U.S. Civil War, cotton and slaves constituted two of the most valuable commodities in the United States. During the Civil War, cotton planters in the confederacy halted exports to Europe because of European countries’ support for the northern, industrial armies. Consequently, European textile makers turned to new cotton markets in Egypt, India, and Brazil. Worldwide production of cotton expanded during the U.S. civil war, driving down the price of cotton following the War.
Although cotton was grown and produced in the Southern U.S. states that would become the heart of the Confederacy, Cotton textiles were manufactured in Northern U.S. cities. In fact, the first industrial factory in the United States was a cotton textile factory based in Lowell, Massachusetts. Thus, the story of cotton is not only a story of “King cotton” on U.S. southern plantations, but also of textile manufacturing in the North.
Cotton has played a central role in the making of African American life and culture in the United States. Enslaved Africans comprised the overwhelming majority of cotton laborers in the United States and the “cotton kingdom” appears regularly in African American writing and folklore about the brutalities of cotton production. At the same time, some of the most creative and imaginative expressive culture within African American communities revolves around cotton and its production, such as in the case of African American quilting.
This course is an interdisciplinary study of cotton as commodity crop requiring extensive labor, as a global commodity produced in many geographies, as a central commodity in the growth of industrial manufacturing, and as an object which contains histories of pain and suffering, as well as speculative longings for a different modernity and future. The course is a study of cotton’s role in the making of modernity, as well as a study of cotton’s role in imagining and redesigning modernity from the vantage point of those who labored, in unfree conditions, to make cotton commodities possible.
Arts and Activism in the Contemporary Americas
Syllabus created by Krista Brune, Jessica Klimoff, Mary Zaborshis, Michelle McGowen
The twenty-first century has been a ripe era for social movements, political activism, and artistic engagement in the hemispheric Americas. From Occupy to Black Lives Matter, from Me Too to Ni Una Menos, and beyond, the arts have helped to amplify, circulate, and mediate the ideas and actions of these diverse movements. Rather than provide a comprehensive panorama of the intersections of arts and politics in recent decades, this course offers an exploration of these movements, their stakes, and their mediations through specific studies. The parallels, encounters, and divergences between these cases invite a deeper reflection on the meaning of activism, protest, solidarity, art, and media in relation to social and political movements. Placing more familiar, US-based movements in dialogue with events unfolding in Latin America and the Caribbean facilitates an examination of the complexities of hemispheric dynamics and the interconnected nature of politics, social movements, and the arts.
Arts and Activism in the Contemporary Americas syllabus
Reading the Futures, Presents, and Pasts of Climate Change
Syllabus created by Thomas Beebee, Jessica Klimoff, and Anna Piotti
This syllabus is comprised of three separate units: one on how speculative fiction imagines the futures of climate change; a second unit on literary representations of the “presents” of climate change and crisis; and a third on the intersections and divergences between scientific and literary constructions of environmental knowledge. Taken together, the three units invite students to consider the limits of their own knowledge of what the environment is and what climate change might become.
The units are designed to be modular; instructors may choose to use the syllabus in its entirety, or to pull out one or two of the units and use it in another syllabus.
Download from here “Reading the Futures, Presents, and Pasts of Climate Change”