AFST 463Contemporary Ecologies

Catalog

"Contemporary Ecologies" offers an introduction to, and a hands-on experience of, ecological aesthetics. Drawing from African and Asian diasporic literatures, theorizing, and art, and the feminist, queer, urban, and virtual ecological perspectives that they engender, the class will bring critical analysis and imagination to bear on recent events: earthquakes and floods, rising sea levels, tsunami; the coral reefs; green revolutions that seek alternate sources of energy and the production of "natural" lingerie, yet render barren once verdant islands; rapidly expanding cityscapes such as Nairobi, Mumbai, Ujung Pandang, and Beijing. "There will be fish falling from the sky, just like rain," Haruki Murakami's tale of two thousand sardines and a few mackerel that plunged from the clouds to the road in front of the shopping mall, still with the smell of the sea about them, fuses art, science, and everyday observation with the unexpected. The class will consider the 'unexpected' by working with proverbs, artworks, logics, and tales, song, marine science, and local wisdom, that inhabit openings between worlds. Simultaneously taught: AFST463*, PHIL480S, AAAS480K, COLI480S, WGSS481A,ENVI481C (*denotes primary course)