Strange Things: Race, Gender, and Objecthood

Catalog description

This course investigates the blurry divisions between persons and things, animate and inanimate beings, and human and non-human life in U.S. literature and media. This class brings together feminist theory, ethnic studies, queer theory, literary criticism, and film and media studies to explore how distinctions between the human and non-human are variously shaped and unsettled by race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. What role do different media and technology play in producing, estranging, and transforming the meanings of persons and things? And how have these differences been structured by histories and legacies of empire and settler colonialism? To address these questions, we will read and view texts in a range of media from the nineteenth century through the present, with primary emphasis on African American and Asian American literary and cultural production from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.