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.
