Making Metropolitan "Man”: The Politics of Human Being in Modern Urban Space

Catalog description

The modern human subject, what is often understood as Man, is not a natural evolutionary state but an historically contingent and contested idea of what it means to be a person. This course places critical theories of the human into conversation with urban and geographic studies. How have dominant concepts of Man and its Others – Black, Indigenous, femme, queer; machine, animal, environment; and so forth – been constituted and challenged through cities and space? How might urban space make possible alternative humanisms that refuse metropolitan modernity’s subjecting projects? The course takes a translocal lens while focusing on the American-Atlantic World since European conquest. Theory-intensive readings draw upon cultural studies; queer, ethnic, and Black studies; geography; history; and literary/aesthetic arts.