The goal of this course is to familiarize students with visual production, particularly video production, as a mode of inquiry to explore questions related to race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and other forms of social hierarchy and difference. The class will include readings in visual production as a mode of inquiry and on the basic craft of video production in various genres (fiction, documentary, and experimental). As part of the course, students will produce a video short and complete it by semester’s end.

Instructor: Nicole M. Gervasio

This course explores representations of violence in contemporary novels, films, and short stories from Africa and the Caribbean. When postcolonial writers decide to represent violence in their countries, they risk reproducing racist stereotypes that permeate international media. And yet, experiences of violence such as civil war, rape, religious fanaticism, and ethnic strife are intimate features of their national histories. How can postcolonial writers undermine the harmful stereotypes and dominant narratives that predetermine their stories in the international public sphere without reproducing stereotypes? In this course, we will take an interdisciplinary and feminist approach to the politics of representing violence to better understand violence abroad. Our readings, paired with options for poetry slams, film screenings, and walking tours in New York City, will also prompt us to reflect critically on violence in our own U.S. culture. We will engage literary representations of historical events ranging from the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the Rwandan genocide, all the way up to Black Lives Matter.This course counts for one of the two courses required for the university-wide Global Core requirement in addition to fulfilling English major requirements for prose fiction/narrative and comparative/global literature. This seminar will appeal to students interested in human rights, history, political science, African studies, law, and gender and sexuality studies.

Course highlights include:

• Urgent Human Rights Issues | violence against women, human trafficking, systemic racism, homophobia and transphobia, child soldiers, genocide, & terrorism
• Fulfills University Requirements | Global Core, English Major prose fiction/narrative & comparative/global literature
• African & Caribbean Literature | short stories, music videos, films, novels, & art
• Field Trips | Nuyorican Poetry Café, Harlem history walk, Human Rights Watch Film Festival & Human Rights Watch Archives
• World History | Holocaust, Vietnam War, the Rwandan Genocide, Black Lives Matter
• Interdisciplinary Approach | comparative literature, history, art, international affairs, sociology, Africana studies, gender & sexuality
• Innovative Course Design | creative & nontraditional assignments

*The instructor, Nicole Gervasio, is a Mellon Mays Fellow and CULPA “gold nugget” professor (for syllabus, email nmg2138@columbia.edu)

**Make sure to register by May 1; beyond this date, summer courses without minimum enrollment are due to be cancelled.

Instructors: D. Antoniou and M. Gumpert

This course examines the way particular spaces – cultural, urban, literary – serve as sites for the production and reproduction of cultural and political imaginaries. It places particular emphasis on the themes of the polis, the city, and the nation-state as well as on spatial representations of and responses to notions of the Hellenic across time. Students will consider a wide range of texts as spaces – complex sites constituted and complicated by a multiplicity of languages – and ask: How central is the classical past in Western imagination? How have great metropolises such as Paris, Istanbul, and New York fashioned themselves in response to the allure of the classical and the advent of modern Greece? The question of space and the site-specific will also be raised by the very logistics of the course, which will link two classrooms, two groups of students, and two professors – one at Columbia University, and the other at Boğaziçi University, by way of long-distance technologies.   This course fulfills the global core requirement.

Instructor: Moneera Al-Ghadeer

This course is primarily a comprehensive introduction to Arab women novelists and the representation of race and gender, foregrounding the discussion of race in classical and medieval Arabic literary and intellectual texts. We will explore the questions of blackness, race, and gender in novels from Algeria, the Arabian Peninsula, Lebanon, Syria, and Sudan, allowing the students to develop critical understanding of how these concepts operate within institutional and cultural frameworks. All texts are read in English.

Instructor: Muhsin Al-Musawi

This course studies the genealogy of the prison in Arab culture as manifested in memoirs, narratives, and poems. These cut across a vast temporal and spatial swathe, covering selections from the Quran, Sufi narratives from al-Halllaj oeuvre, poetry by prisoners of war: classical, medieval, and modern. It   also studies modern narratives by women prisoners and political prisoners, and narratives that engage with these issues. Arabic prison writing is studied against other genealogies of this prism, especially in the West, to map out the birth of prison, its institutionalization, mechanism, and role. All readings for the course are in English translations.

Instructor: Muhsin Al-Musawi

This course studies the genealogy of the prison in Arab culture as manifested in memoirs, narratives, and poems. These cut across a vast temporal and spatial swathe, covering selections from the Quran, Sufi narratives from al-Halllaj oeuvre, poetry by prisoners of war: classical, medieval, and modern. It   also studies modern narratives by women prisoners and political prisoners, and narratives that engage with these issues. Arabic prison writing is studied against other genealogies of this prism, especially in the West, to map out the birth of prison, its institutionalization, mechanism, and role. All readings for the course are in English translations.

This course examines psychoanalytic movements that are viewed either as post-Freudian in theory or as emerging after Freud’s time. The course begins by considering the ways Freud’s cultural and historical surround, as well as the wartime diaspora of the European psychoanalytic community, shaped Freudian and post-Freudian thought. It then focuses on significant schools and theories of psychoanalysis that were developed from the mid 20th century to the present. Through readings of key texts and selected case studies, it explores theorists’ challenges to classical thought and technique, and their reconfigurations, modernizations, and total rejections of central Freudian ideas. The course concludes by looking at contemporary theorists’ moves to integrate notions of culture, concepts of trauma, and findings from neuroscience and attachment research into the psychoanalytic frame.

This course will primarily consist in the task of translating the remarkably challenging poem Beowulf.  We will be reading smaller portions of the vast secondary texts as we negotiate and debate issues raised by our readings and contemporary scholarship. As we work through the language of the text, comparing translations with our own, we will also be tracking concepts. Each student will be using the communal Wiki for posting translations as well as for starting individual projects on word clusters/concepts. The requirements of the course as as follows: active participation in discussion of assigned topics and translations in class and online (40 percent); three oral presentations, one on an assigned section of the text and secondary reading (15 percent) one as a first resaerch topic which ties in analysis of one or two words (15 percent) and one as a final research presentation which develops the word/cluster concept in relation to secondary materials (30 percent). The last two will be turned in and should be approximately five and eight pages.

A GLOBAL CORE course.

This course examines, in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain and England (1580-1640), how the two countries staged the conflict between them, and with the Ottoman Empire; that is, how both countries represent national and imperial clashes, and the concepts of being “Spanish,” “English,” or “Turk,” often played out on the high seas of the Mediterranean with Islam and the Ottoman Empire. We will consider how the Ottoman Empire depicted itself artistically through miniatures and court poetry. The course will include travel and captivity narratives from Spain, England, the Ottoman Empire and Barbary States.