Home  |  Readings  |  Activities  |  Black Diasporas  |  Courses  |  Immigration  |  Literature  |  People  |  Current Events

Josh Kun: Visiting Faculty 1998-1999

Josh Kun, the Center's inaugural Visting Faculty member, is a scholar interested in issues of both audiophonics and literature, Josh earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and was based in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst during his stay in the area. Josh taught a number of courses at the Five Colleges and has also delivered a series of talks in the area, including the Keynote Address at the 1999 CISA Student Symposium. Courses: English 61. Amhest College, Fall 1998: "Studies in American Literature: Culture and Performance in the U.S. -Mexico Borderlands" - This undergraduate course examines the extended, transnational spaces of the US-Mexico borderlands as sites of two-way cultural traffic, production and performance. Moving between places such as Tijuana, El Paso, Matamoros, Neuvo Laredo, Juarez and Los Angeles, we examine a wide-ranging mix that includes popular music, literature, folklore, performance art, photography, video art, painting, film, and music video. Comparative Literature 693, UMass Amherst, Fall 1998: "Culture's Ear: Methodologies of Listening" - This graduate seminar is designed to serve as an introduction to listening as a methodology of critical practice. Beginning with the assumption that Western critical discourse has been traditionally marked by an overtly visual or ocular bias, we attempt to construct an alternative archaeology of the aural, one that explores the discursive possibilities of privileging the ear over the eye. Mount Holyoke College, Spring 1999: "Sound Clash: Race, Ethnicity, and Popular Music" - This undergraduate course approaches the history of U.S. race and ethnicity as a history of popular sound -- a dissonant conglomeration of noises, songs, mixes, beats, verses, and collages that tell revealing stories about the way indentities are formed and de-formed and nations are imagined and transgressed. UMass Amherst, Spring 1999: "Im/migration and Twentieth Century American Literature" - This undergraduate course explores the impact of im/migration on the construction of "American" identities and the formation of the "American" literary imagination. How have processes of immigration and migration served as organizing themes throughout twentieth century American literature and how have they impacted the history of racial and ethnic formations in the U.S.? Talks: "America, I Hear You Singing: Tunings In the Audio-Racial Imagination" -Moving back and forth between the 1964 Reprise Records release "America, I Hear you Singing" and the contemporary Tijuana punkero band "Tijuana NO", Josh's talk introduces concepts such as the "audio-racial imagination" and the "audiotopia" in order to address the relationship between music, race and the possibilities of critical postnational listening. "CISA's Second Year: A Keynote Address" - This talk is a reflection on both CISA's second year and what Josh calls the "Americas 90210" model of cross-border thinking. The full text of this talk can be found here.