Instructor: Anaheed Al-Hardan

The end of the Second World War also marked the end of European dominion over most of the world and the rise of the US and the USSR as new global powers. In 1955, leaders of the newly independent Afro-Asian states met in Bandung, Indonesia, in a watershed conference that marked the beginning of a new epoch of Afro-Asian solidarity, decolonization and common anti-colonial struggles. Seven Arab states took part in this watershed conference, and Egypt would later play host to the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization. This course will introduce students to the legacy of this era as seen from the vantage point of the Arab World and West Asia more broadly. It will consider the ways in which this era has influenced first postcolonial and later decolonial scholarship, and engage some of the works to emerge from the Arab anti-colonial era of the 20th century available in English translation. In the first half of the course, students will consider the main distinctions between postcolonial and decolonial theory, decolonization and decoloniality, and engage with different conceptualizations of colonial modernity. Students will also critically evaluate this theory through works that foreground political economy and the intellectual history the Ottoman Empire, the forerunner to European Empire in the region. In the second half of the course, students will consider the Bandung moment and the centrality of Egypt to the Afro-Asian anti-colonial imaginary, and engage some of Arab and Iranian anti-colonial thinkers and themes in relation to the legacies of the decolonization movements and the resultant knowledges and decolonial pedagogies of the formerly colonized world.

The politics of truth have rarely been more pressing than today. And few questions have preoccupied the arts more over the last hundred years. Indeed, the documentary impulse cannot be confined to any single art form or medium. Accordingly, this doctoral seminar sets out from the present to explore the rise of the documentary impulse across a range of early-20th century media and art forms (photography, theater, exhibition design, architecture, and especially film), artists/ documentarians (Farocki, Sander, Vertov, Ivens, Piscator, etc.), and movements (Surrealism, Constructivism, Factography, New Vision, etc.). Readings will focus on historical sources and recent scholarship culled especially from art history and film and media studies. The esteemed film scholar Thomas Elsaesser will be a regular guest in the seminar, which is offered under the auspices of Columbia’s program in Comparative Media. Doctoral students are encouraged to apply from all relevant fields. Same as CMPM GR8477.

In the 1920s, the Soviet Union and the U.S. emerged as growing world powers, offering each other two compelling, if often opposed, versions of modernity. At the same time, each country saw its intercontinental rival as an attractive, but dangerous “other”: a counterexample of the road not taken, and a foil for its own ideology and identity. From the 1920s to the heat of the Cold War, Some of the USSR’s most prominent public figures came to the U.S. and several American intellectuals, progressive activists, and officials traveled to the Soviet experiment. This course examines the cultural images of the American and Soviet “other” in the texts that resulted from these exchanges. We will read works about America from Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ilya Il’f and Evgeny Petrov, and poems, essays, and novels about Russia by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Louise Bryant, W.E.B. Du Bois, John Steinbeck, and others. Each of these texts attempts to grapple with what it means to be modern—both technologically advanced and socially liberated—in different national contexts and under different proclaimed ideologies.

Almost a century after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman past lives on in contemporary Greece, often in unexpected sites. In the built environment it appears as mosques, baths, covered markets, and fountains adorned with Arabic inscriptions. It also manifests itself in music, food, and language. Yet Ottoman legacies also shape the European present in less obvious ways and generate vehement debates about identity, nation-building, human rights, and interstate relations. In this course, we will be drawing on history, politics, anthropology, and comparative literature as well as a broad range of primary materials to view the Ottoman past through the lens of the Greek present. What understandings of nation-building emerge as more Ottoman archives became accessible to scholars? How does Islamic Family Law—still in effect in Greece—confront the European legal system? How are Ottoman administrative structures re-assessed in the context of acute socio-economic crisis and migration?

Almost a century after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman past lives on in contemporary Greece, often in unexpected sites. In the built environment it appears as mosques, baths, covered markets, and fountains adorned with Arabic inscriptions. It also manifests itself in music, food, and language. Yet Ottoman legacies also shape the European present in less obvious ways and generate vehement debates about identity, nation-building, human rights, and interstate relations. In this course, we will be drawing on history, politics, anthropology, and comparative literature as well as a broad range of primary materials to view the Ottoman past through the lens of the Greek present. What understandings of nation-building emerge as more Ottoman archives became accessible to scholars? How does Islamic Family Law—still in effect in Greece—confront the European legal system? How are Ottoman administrative structures re-assessed in the context of acute socio-economic crisis and migration?

Analysis and discussion of the relation of literature to painting, photography, and film. Emphasis on artistic and literary concepts concerning the visual dimension of narrative and poetic texts from Homer to Burroughs. Explores the role of description, illustration, and montage in realist and modern literature.

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 BoÄŸaziçi University, by way of long-distance technologies.   This course fulfills the global core requirement.

A survey of the Czech, German, and German-Jewish literary cultures of Prague from 1910 to 1920. Special attention to Hašek, ÄŒapek, Kafka, Werfel, and Rilke. Parallel reading lists available in English and in the original.

Instructor:  Sarah Bin Tyeer

The focus of this seminar will be novels by Arab writers. The course will explore the history of the Arabic novel: its rise, development, and evolution. We will read and analyze novels belonging to various periods in Arab history and representing diverse points of views, including gender, identities, and different sub-cultures and sub-genres. We will look into the connections therein between the novel and the historical backdrops of colonialism, decolonization, globalization, war, rights and personal independence from several perspectives and writers across the Arab world. We will also consider the modern Arabic novel’s engagement with the global, glocal, and local as well as its nod to the Arabic literary tradition; its engagement with technology, scientific progress, absurdity, loss, trauma, the human condition, as well as dystopic themes.  No knowledge of Arabic is required.

This course in the contemporary international novel looks at the rise of the bildungsroman, the novelistic genre in some sense defined by the development and maturation of the protagonist, in the context of twentieth-century political, cultural, and social developments of (post)colonialism, imperialism, human rights discourse, and globalization. This course will trace some of the philosophical formulations of the teleology of human development, and the attendant notions of individuality and sociality, to study the ways in which these novels from the so-called “Third World” variously, and sometimes simultaneously, subscribe to, resist, and renegotiate the fundamental conceptions of human development through creative engagement with the bildungsroman and its generic formulations.