Film & Media Studies 373 - Race and Empire

(Offered as ENGL 378 and FAMS 373.)  Anti-racists, dark comics, revolutionary anarchists, queer dystopians, and communitarian futurists have long sought aesthetic means to resist common-sense understandings of racial identity and imperial politics.  Exploring film and literature, in texts of both fiction and non-fiction, we will ask how life has been lived in the context of race and empire, as well as how it might be lived otherwise.  We will address intimate and local forms of racism but, following Frantz Fanon’s claim that race is a fundamental component of culture and “never a superadded element,” we will also theorize ways in which race and empire also structure our present.  We will incorporate insights gained through formal analysis with critical readings in history and political theory, in films from Imitation of Life to Born in Flames to Machete, and in literary writing by authors including Richard Wright, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Peter Dimock.

Open to sophomores and juniors.  Limited to 30 students.  Fall semester.  Visiting Professor Tierney.