PHIL 480HHaunting, Memory, Migrations

Catalog

How do contemporary global migrations haunt the cityscapes and bodyscapes, the landscapes and mindscapes, of our daily lives and our dreams? Drawing upon recent African and Asian diasporic, feminist, and LGBTQ+ literatures, visual and sonic productions, and theorizing, we will develop a multidimensional working space. Our aim is to analyze, question, and explore expressive narratives of haunting, memory, migrations, especially their power to transform our relation to histories, communities, and the cosmos. At once transdisciplinary, multisensory, and transmedial, our resources, which include creative writing by Harold Sonny Ladoo and Lorna Goodison, essays by Trinh T Minh-ha and Edouard Glissant. experimental multi-platform art and writing by Natasha Tonteym, Kiripi Katembo Siku, Coda Wei, and others, the films of Mansour Sora Wade and Tsai Ming-liang, and a children's story by Dionne Brand--will theorize and enact a cross-platform aesthetics that is itself in transformation. In "Time Lag," Noriko Ambe cuts pre-existing patterns and information in books as she collaborates with and alters them to understand their concepts and to find moments of intersection or conflict. Her aim is not to cut perfect lines, but to stay with the process. Similarly, participants will keep a record, which may be in any medium, essay, creative writing, sound, film, multimedia, etc., of their reflections and journeys during the course. Drawing from that record, and working individually or in small groups, participants will develop a project that reflects their engagement with the class.Simultaneously taught: PHIL 480H/AFST 480R*/AAAS 480H/COLI 480H/WGSS 482C/ENG 450M(*denotes primary course).