Captive Theory

Catalog description

We experience our world (and the histories of our world) increasingly as a conglomerate of spaces of and for containment. These enclosed spaces are multiple, and their strategies of who and how they imprison are profoundly unequal. How does theory, or rather, different theoretical approaches, deal with structures and experiences of captivity? What captive figures are being used, how are they theorized, and what ways of escaping, opening up, or destroying spaces of captivity are envisioned? In this course, we will draw on a wide range of theoretical approaches to scrutinize an array of figures of captivity, such as the camp, the prison, the campus, the closet, the hold, the enclosure, the frame, the panopticon, the trap, the globe, the screen, for a comparative assessment. We will focus on captivity and its avatars in theory but also reflect on what makes theory itself captive, even complicit in imagining and structuring our reality by way of containment.