Special Topics in English; Deep Time: Memory, Media, and Ecological Imagination in the Americas

As an engagement with scholarship at the intersection of literary, ethnic, and ecological media studies, this class will offer a variety of opportunities to conceptualize different kinds of recording and transmission. It is also a class about media, and how experiences of identity are made more possible or impossible by different media forms. How do we extend "media" to account for experiences grounded in biological worlds: water, land, body? And why do so many scholars and artists want us to think about the earth itself as a recording device, one that mediates social, political, and aesthetic claims that would otherwise go unanswered? That in mind, we will look specifically at texts that ask us to understand both media and ecological materialities through three foundational experiences across the Americas— enslavement, migration, and displacement. Texts we will look at this semester might include music by Bessie Smith, Drexciya, and Beyoncé; visual art by Ellen Gallagher and Ana Mendieta; writing by Jean Toomer, Joy Kogawa, Jamaica Kincaid, Édouard Glissant, Linda Hogan, Edwidge Danticat, Cherie Dimaline, Glora Anzaldúa, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs; and films like Hart's Fast Color, Akomfrah’s Last Angel of History, and Dash's Daughter’s of the Dust. Over the course of the semester students will also be asked to integrate their investigations into medium with their own forays into literary and cultural analysis, including digital or experimental scholarship production.

 

Section(s):
0101 -   Marisa Parham