Dissensus

If strong feelings like anger or optimism are the engines behind revolution and radical change, then what is the place of less powerful feelings like dissatisfaction? How might “minor” feelings—like melancholy, shame, humiliation, or evasion—activate forms of political discourse that are sit alongside major feelings like anger and revolutionary foment? This course asks whether the seemingly oppositional discourses of major and minor feelings—revolutionary feeling on one hand and low-grade resistance on the other—can unearth categories of social disenfranchisement across transnational literatures spanning postcolonial Anglophone to vernacular and regional texts. We will consider how expressions of care, love, and desire articulate continuities with anger as well as melancholic feeling in South Asian and West African (Anglophone and translated from Bengali, Urdu, and Arabic) as well as transnational American (multi-ethnic) writing. How do we understand the persistence of deep historical hurt across vectors of race, class, gender, and nationality? In what ways have colonialism and imperialism shaped our understanding of a much-valorized global future? How does the vexed category of transnationalism, as both a temporal and spatial marker of geopolitical fluidity, influence the articulation of revolution and resistance in anglophone and regional writing? Key texts will include Mime Okube’s.Citizen 13660 Mahashweta Devi’s Mother of 1084, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes and the short stories of Bessie Head. These concerns will be supplemented by theorists like Aime Cesaire, Gayatri Spivak, Fred Moten, and Sara Ahmed. In short, we will interlace global novels, film, and short stories with critical theory and historical studies to understand how revolutionary as well as non-revolutionary feelings generate critical frameworks of change through disparate modes of resistance.

Select Texts:

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660

B.R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste

Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis

Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Solmaz Sharif, Look: Poems (Selections)

Image: Moudjahiddines algériens à la montagne (FLN fighters during the Algerian War of Independence)