On Entaglement

Catalog description

The poet and activist Ross Gay has said, “We are entangled. Any movement toward disentangling ourselves from each other is wreckage. It’s wreckage.” This course examines the notion of entanglement—our inevitable condition as human beings who live deeply interconnected to one another and to this earth—as a grounds for poetic, political, and embodied engagement at a moment of profound crisis and necessary paradigm shift within our human society. With a specific eye towards contemporary and recent-historical crises and movements, we explore what it means to reckon with notions of autonomy and interdependence within existing structures of power, explore pathways to loosening ourselves and one another from white, patriarchal capitalist ways of being, and to acknowledge and take up other ways of knowing. We examine lessons from various social movements; indigenous ways of knowing and being; non-white feminist and queer caregiving practices; symbiosis and reciprocity within natural ecosystems; and the expansive possibilities offered by embodied practices. This course will engage deeply with poetry as both source and form, including the work of Ross Gay, Brenda Shaughnessy, June Jordan, Amy Nezhukumatathil, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Eve L. Ewing, and Aracelis Girmay. Other course materials will range from essay and memoir to fine art, including the likes of Anna Tsing, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Carina del Valle Schorske.