It has become a truism that different forms of personal writing—dairies, memoirs, autobiographies, personal essays—are potent expressions of political assertion, for demonstrating how the personal is political. But has the efflorescence of such work also resulted in the bracketing of the personal away from the collective, so as to re-inscribe a boundary between individuals and the collectivities to which they belong? Has it simply reversed the marginalization of the personal in older national liberation or Marxist movements?

This seminar will explore the relationship between the personal and collective “voice” and the dynamics of dissent through different types of life-writing and key theoretical work. In what way can we interpret, rewrite and extend the idea that the personal is political? Can life-writing allow us to understand the limits of liberal ideas of subject-hood? Is the personal narrative useful in charting the dynamics of collective rebellion, and conversely, does collective action circumscribe the contours of the personal?

Readings might include the following (final selections will be made over the summer ):
Theoretical, historical and political writings:
James Scott, Domination and Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.
Gramsci: State and Civil Society, selections
B. R. Ambedkar, The Annihilation of Caste
CLR James, The Black Jacobins
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Paulo Friere, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony
Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory
Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence
Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Carceral Aesthetics
Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump
Alpa Shah, In The Shadows of the State, Indigenous Politics, Environmentalism and Insurgency in Jharkhand, India

Autobiographies, memoirs and life-writing:
The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian maidservant
Stree Shakti Sanghatana, We Were Making History: Women and the Telangana Uprising
Urmila Pawar, The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs
Aman Sethi, A Free Man
Jacob Dlamini Native Nostalgia
Revathi, The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life story
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: the political life of Black Communist Claudia Jones

Novels:
Raja Rao Kanthapura
Tendulkar, Kanyaadaan
Tsitsi Damgarembga Nervous Conditions
Tayib Salih Season of Migration to the North
Alejo Carpentier Kingdom of This World.

Film: American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs

This course explores life in contemporary and postcolonial Italy and some of its most pressing challenges, including immigration, racial politics, hybrid identities, citizenship, and globalization. Students will focus on the social and cultural changes that altered and complicated Italy’s image and status beginning during the 80’s migration movements (mainly from Africa). Specifically, students will identify the connections between Italy’s present and its (often overlooked) colonial past; analyze what constitute Italian-ness (italianità) and the novel ways of expressing black Italian-ness; reflect on how race and blackness are represented in Italian discourses; discuss which modes of expression are being used to describe the contemporary identity crisis in Italy. At the end of the course, students will be familiar with Black Italian artists, writers, and filmmakers, all of whom offer original and multilayered depictions of the interconnections between Italy and Africa and help to reposition Italy in the broad context of the black diaspora.

In the 20th Century the history of Italian critical engagements with “Literature,” understood as language, rhetoric, style, and also connected to politics and culture is quite varied and complex. Predictably, the involvement with society and/or the “aesthetic” dimension of Literature have been prominent features of the development of Italian criticism and literary theory, and writers have often engaged in literary criticism and theory, either reflecting on literary works or on history and society. The course will focus primarily on “writers about writing”, presenting a variety of approaches and views expressed by famous Italian novelists in the course of the 20th Century. Starting with Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci the political, cultural, social uses of literature have been the focus of “militant critics” who positioned themselves in an openly declared emancipative effort to rely on “literature” as the expression of social change and the potential for transformative liberation. A great many of these “intellettuali” were writers, often engaged in public expression (in periodicals and newspapers), but also in debates hosted by literary journals whose orientations spanned from the sociological to the formalist and structuralist. Even in their most “structuralist” works, Italian writers performed their involvement with criticism with a persistent valorization of history. This is probably the most distinctive feature of the Italian theoretical production of the period. Prominent among the many writers who produced books and articles are: Pasolini, Moravia , Morante, Calvino, Eco, N. Ginzburg, Pavese, Sciascia, Ferrante and Lahiri. Their volumes and articles dealing with language, writing and literature will be discussed so as to provide a map of the most relevant concerns and issues they faced and raised. The availability of their texts in English translation will be pursued for the benefit of students who do not speak Italian but are interested in the course. Students are expected to read all the readings and participate actively to class discussion. Taking turns, they will be asked to prepare a presentation before the class, focusing in particular on one writer or work. Students in the class are expected to respond to their peer’s presentation and enrich the discussion with relevant comments. At the end of the course each student will submit a scholarly paper going more deeply into one or more of the works studied. This paper should engage with the critical perspective of the author chosen.

This is an advanced topics course treating some important issues in contemporary Renaissance studies.

In 1989-1991, a whole world, perhaps many worlds, vanished: the worlds of socialism. In this graduate seminar we will investigate key cultural works, theoretical constructs and contexts spanning the socialist world(s), focused around the USSR, which was for many the (not uncontested) center of the socialist cosmos. Further, we will study the cultural and political interrelationships between the socialist world(s) and anticolonial and left movements in the developing and the capitalist developed nations alike. Finally, we will investigate the aftermaths left behind as these world(s) crumbled or were transformed beyond recognition at the end of the twentieth century. Our work will be ramified by consideration of a number of critical and methodological tools for the study of these many histories and geographies. The purview of the course is dauntingly large - global in scale - and therefore "coverage" will of necessity be incomplete. In addition to the lead instructor, a number of guest instructors from Penn and from other institutions will join us to lead our investigations into specific geographies, moments and areas. Additionally, four weeks have been left without content, to be filled in via consensus decision by the members of the seminar.

This course takes up the question of reading South Asian Literature both as a collection of diverse literary cultures, as well as the basis for a methodology of reading that takes language, region, and history into account. It takes as a starting point recent work that foregrounds the importance of South Asian language, literatures, and their complex interactions, to an understanding of South Asian literary history, as well as critiques of the concept of world literature that question its underlying assumptions and frequent reliance on cosmopolitan languages such as English. In what ways can we describe the many complex interactions between literary cultures in South Asia, rooted in specific historical contexts, reading practices, and cultural expectations, while maintaining attention to language and literary form? How, in turn, can we begin to think of these literatures in interaction with larger conversations in the world? With these considerations in mind, we will examine works of criticism dealing with both modern and pre-modern literatures, primarily but not exclusively focused on South Asia. Topics will include the concept of the cosmopolis in literary and cultural history, the role of translation, the transformations of literature under colonialism, and twentieth century literary movements such as realism and Dalit literature. Readings may include works by Erich Auerbach, Frederic Jameson, Aijaz Ahmad, Gayatri Spivak, Aamir Mufti, Sheldon Pollack, David Shulman, Yigal Bronner, Shamshur Rahman Faruqi, Francesca Orsini, Subramanian Shankar, Sharankumar Kimbale, and Torlae Jatin Gajarawala. We will also examine selected works, in English and in translation, as case studies for discussion. This course is intended both for students who intend to specialize in the study of South Asia, as well as for those who focus on questions of comparative literature more broadly.

We will read selections from the Greek poem together, alongside some modern scholarship on it. We will also read Plato's Ion and the Battle of the Mice and Frogs, as evidence for Homer's ancient philosophical, rhetorical and poetic receptions. We will discuss the history of the poem's translation into English, focusing on earlier translations (Chapman, Hobbes, Pope) and discussing the instructor's goals and challenges in producing a new re-translation. We will also talk about two recent novelizations of the poem, Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls and Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles. The course is primarily intended for graduate students in Classical Studies and Ancient History, but it is also open to students in other programs, including those whose Greek might be less advanced. Prerequisite: most students should have a reading knowledge of Homeric Greek. If your Greek is rudimentary or non-existent, but you are keen to take the class and can bring other kinds of expertise to our discussions, please contact the instructor to discuss the possibility!