(Offered as ENGL 487 and FAMS 453.)  Digital technologies tend to be described as absolutely new, without any precedent in history or culture.  But these technologies are just the latest to have shaped culture, as well as the many ways that we talk about culture.  Ours is a complex present, filled by technologies that are brand new as well as devices and artforms that survive from earlier periods of innovation.  In this way, videogames and surveillance systems coexist with books and movies, and technophobes share their world with technophiles.

(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.

(Offered as ENGL 487 and FAMS 453.)  Digital technologies tend to be described as absolutely new, without any precedent in history or culture.  But these technologies are just the latest to have shaped culture, as well as the many ways that we talk about culture.  Ours is a complex present, filled by technologies that are brand new as well as devices and artforms that survive from earlier periods of innovation.  In this way, videogames and surveillance systems coexist with books and movies, and technophobes share their world with technophiles.

(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.