Instructor: S. Kaviraj and D. Miron

Instructor: E. Basea

This inter- and cross-disciplinary course addresses a wide range of fields from film theory and aesthetics to cultural studies and history, exploring questions of film style, transnational and cosmopolitan filmmaking practices, national industries and audience reception. We will begin by discussing recent debates in film studies about (trans)national and peripheral cinemas before proceeding to a   reading of a few paradigmatic cases of films that are either produced in Greece or deal about Greece. You are encouraged to critically reflect     on the introduced approaches in (trans)national, peripheral and cosmopolitan filmmaking, read films filmically (in terms of their   narrative and style), locate them in their wider socio-political and economic contexts of production and reception, and suggest other case studies based on your own  background and interests. We will approach films from a Cultural Studies perspective. This means that while a film may be entertaining in its own right, we will want to view it also with an eye to what it can tell us about the history of a particular time, place and movement.

No previous knowledge of Modern Greek history is required. This is why the course is addressed  to Modern Greek studies students but also to film studies students and all proud   cinephiles eager to explore previously ignored cinemas.

All  films  have English subtitles. There will be an optional 1-credit bilingual section for those students able to read and discuss materials in Greek.

We can’t talk about human rights without talking about the forms in which we talk about human rights. This course will study the convergences of the thematics, philosophies, politics, practices, and formal properties of literature and human rights. In particular, it will examine how literary questions of narrative shape (and are shaped by) human rights concerns; how do the forms of stories enable and respond to forms of thought, forms of commitment, forms of being, forms of justice, and forms of violation? How does narrative help us to imagine an international order based on human dignity, rights, and equality? We will read classic literary texts and contemporary writing (both literary and non-literary) and view a number of films and other multimedia projects to think about the relationships between story forms and human rights problematics and practices. Likely literary authors: Roberto Bolaño, Miguel de Cervantes, Assia Djebar, Ariel Dorfman, Slavenka Drakulic, Nuruddin Farah, Janette Turner Hospital, Franz Kafka, Sahar Kalifeh, Sindiwe Magona, Maniza Naqvi, Michael Ondaatje, Alicia Partnoy, Ousmane Sembène, Mark Twain . . . . We will also read theoretical and historical pieces by authors such as Agamben, An-Na’im, Appiah, Arendt, Balibar, Bloch, Chakrabarty, Derrida, Douzinas, Habermas, Harlow, Ignatieff, Laclau and Mouffe, Levinas, Lyotard, Marx, Mutua, Nussbaum, Rorty, Said, Scarry, Soyinka, Spivak, Williams.

*Fulfills Global Core Requirement*

A cross-disciplinary and transnational inquiry into memory politics in the contemporary world. Topics include the relation between history and public memory, transitional justice, media of memory (photography, film, graphic novels, monuments, and memorials) and human rights.

This course is only open to advanced undergraduates. An application is required.  Please send the following information to clasota@columbia.edu no later than November 7, 2013. Students will be  notified of application decisions during early registration week: year and major, relevant courses taken, and interest in the course.

Instructor: M. Griffiths and S. Chao

This course will introduce students to debates in conceiving the global in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, before turning to think the representation of these concepts in literature, cinema, and the mass media in their rapidly globalizing context. Such enlightenment concepts as the public sphere, the market, modernity, human rights, diaspora, and the modern nation state will be subjected to genealogies that also take seriously the fact that as these concepts globalize: they reform and alter. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this course will provoke students to ask why intellectuals from scholars to policy makers to artists have addressed the simultaneous connectedness and disconnection that comes with globality. Through such key concepts, students will engage multiple cultural, linguistic, and geographic spaces as diverse as Latin America, the African diaspora, North America, and South, East, and South East Asia respectively. Coordinated by members of the 2013-14 INTERACT Postdoctoral Collective, the course is taught with the participation of a group of lecturers who are experts in specific regions and issues. Textual, visual, and discursive analysis provide the methodological basis from which to examine concepts which are intrinsic to globalization and globality.

This doctoral seminar will address how the universalization of sexuality as an essential human (and sometime animal) attribute that transcends cultures began to be studied in U.S. academia in earnest in the 1970s, proceeding apace with the mobilization for sexual rights in U.S. domestic social activism, and by the 1980s with the mobilization of universal human rights as a central agenda for both U.S. foreign policy and international activism. With the era of globalization, these trends intensified with the aggressive proliferation of Western-funded non-governmental organizations in the Global North and South. The seminar will examine the literature on the universalization of sexual rights and identities by U.S. and European activists and scholars and the implication this has for sexual citizenship in the Global North and for sexuality studies itself in the Western Academy. Of particular interest to the seminar will be the resistance attributed by this literature to Islam, Muslims, and Arabs to assimilate into this new regime of universal sexuality, whether located in the Muslim or Arab worlds, or among Muslim populations in Europe and the United States and how the latter’s presence in the heart of the Global North may influence sexual citizenship negatively

(Seminar) This course examines how conflicting knowledges and belief-systems have been rendered occult, marginal, or repressed, and it refocuses attention on enchantment in modernity and modern disciplines as a means of their recovery. Among the questions we will explore are the following: From what place, and by what means, is the world enchanted? Is enchantment a compensation for what Freud called “the lost appeal of life on this earth”? Or is it ultimately a privileging of the irrational in a world dominated by reason? What is the place of science in enchantment? Does the decline of religion precipitate the re-enchantment of the world via art? And finally and most importantly, can we understand intellectual formations by revisiting the processes of enchantment and disenchantment? Readings will include conceptual works by Weber, Adorno, Gauchet, Saler, Owen, Latour, and During; and literary works by Kipling, Haggard, du Maurier, Wells, Blavatsky, and Lovecraft, among others. OPEN TO QUALIFIED UNDERGRADUATES WITH PERMISSION FROM THE INSTRUCTOR.

Instructor: Judith Butler

The course will consider philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts of the kinds of violence that ethics seeks to contain as well as the violence that emerges within certain ethical frameworks.  At issue is the question of whether the prohibition on violence invariably partakes of the violence it seeks to forestall.  If so, is there a difference between the binding “force” of prohibition and the violence prohibited? We will seek to distinguish among conceptions of violence, non-violence, ethical violence.

Instructor: L. Krasznahorkai