Intimacies as Method: Studying Black and Brown Relation

Catalog description

Transoceanic Black and Brown intimacy is under-researched and under-represented in the scholarship on race and ethnicity. This seminar will engage with the enduring legacies of connection between Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean forged through the colonial displacements of enslavement and indenture, as well as migration. Through the work of Lisa Lowe, Edouard Glissant, Stuart Hall, as well as a range of contemporary scholarship, we will parse the theoretical frameworks of intimacy, creolization, and Relation. The seminar also includes weekly screenings of films that draw our attention to the specificities of region, to structuring hierarchies of racial, ethnic, and caste affiliation, and invite us to relate large-scale continental intimacies with granular histories of cross-ethnic and inter-racial relation, filled with the messy collision of connections and antagonisms, frictions and solidarities. In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe recommends we focus on "the convergence of asymmetries rather than the imperatives of identity," referring to the asymmetries of contact, encounter, convergence, and solidarity. Edouard Glissant sees collisions between cultures as productive of Relation, where in the multiplicity and diversity of beings in Relation, "each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other." This seminar attends to the fractious realities of these relations, and equally to political, artistic, romantic and other collaborations that attest to coalitional solidarity and sensuous intimacies. Undergraduates who wish to enroll in the seminar are advised get in touch with the instructor.