Electives (ELEC-GG)

This class in performance composition is for those who want to discover and uncover what emerges when they participate in this process, and for students who are interested in the history of performance art. Participants will develop a solo performance through a series of exercises that utilize various strategies for generating and structuring material. (Strategies that can also be used in creating devised group work.) These performance works will emerge from a process involving improvisation (movement and text), writing and composing, and revision of material. Readings include performance texts by prominent artists, essays on performance, and video viewings. (Required texts include Jo Bonney?s Extreme Exposure and Lenora Champagne?s Out from Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists.) Attendance at and written analysis of solo and other edgy performances that occur during the semester and an oral presentation and research paper on a significant performance development or performance artist are also required.

For 20 years, renowned Off-Broadway theatre company The New Group has been premiering and producing character-driven, ensemble-based work. This course will immerse students in the company's approach, which emphasizes character and intimate, visceral ensemble work. Students will jointly develop new performance work through group improvisation and playwriting, while also studying multiple processes and theories of developing a new ensemble-based theatrical work for performance, taking playwright/director Mike Leigh's "improvised play" as a particular model. The course, led by Associate Artistic Director Ian Morgan, will feature master classes from New Group artists, including Artistic Director Scott Elliott.

Sometimes all that separates one discipline from another is how it uses language, so what happens when we try to cross those borders? This class aims to help the student improve writing skills required, not just for the successful completion of the MA degree, but to reach and effectively address the expectations of a diverse academic audience. The course is organized around a series of short but constructive exercises that focus on purposeful drafting, self-editing and revising, sentence grammar, the role of the paragraph, and the varieties of academic essay organization. We will discuss the incorporation of research into original arguments, the avoidance of jargon, attaining clarity, and styles of academic expression. Students will have the opportunity to work with the teachers and each other students on ongoing writing projects, but the grade will be solely based on participation and submission of the class writing exercises. Among the assigned readings will be representations of “good” academic prose relevant to the particular interests of enrolled students, as well as books on academic research and writing by Wayne Booth, Joseph Wiliams, and Joseph Bizup.

This class aims to help the student improve skills required to complete long-form academic writing, not just for the successful completion of the MA degree, but to reach and effectively address the expectations of a diverse academic audience. The course is organized around a series of short but constructive exercises that encourage purposeful drafting and efficient self-editing and revising. We will informally survey the varieties of academic essay organization with particular focus on the role of the introduction, research analysis, and conclusion. Students will have the opportunity to work with the teachers and each other students on ongoing writing projects, including the thesis, but the grade will be solely based on participation and submission of the class writing exercises. Among the assigned readings will be representations of “good” academic prose relevant to the particular interests of enrolled students, as well as books on academic research and writing by Wayne Booth, Joseph Wiliams, and Joseph Bizup.

This course aims to improve the critical reading and writing skills of MA students while deepening their familiarity with current debates on global theory and critical methods. Through close readings of essays by major thinkers of globalism who are also persuasive writers of critical prose, we will sharpen our understanding of how the concept of “the world” has traveled and been transformed in a variety of discursive and cultural contexts. Through frequent critical writing, students will be asked to engage carefully with these essays, not only with the ideas each essay advances but with its ways of advancing them—its writing practice. We will focus on identifying how scholars from a range of disciplines (comparative literature, history, anthropology, political philosophy, art history) and interdisciplinary fields (diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, LGBTQ studies, Africana studies, translation studies, environmental humanities and ecocriticism) structure their arguments (including at the level of the sentence and the paragraph), develop their central and supporting claims, select and integrate their sources, and craft their diction (including jargon, figurative language, and colloquialisms) so as to be heard and trusted in their chosen fields—to belong but also to distinguish themselves in robust debates.

In his celebrated essay “Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets,” renowned dance critic and poet Edwin Denby wrote that “One part of dance criticism is seeing what is happening onstage. The other is describing clearly what it is you saw.” “Of Sylphs, Swans, and Swimmers: Writing About Dance Performance,” an advanced writing seminar, aims to train students to become critical viewers of dance of various kinds and translate that “looking” into analytical and persuasive prose. The course focuses on writing and thinking critically about dance inclusive of a range of genres among them social and popular dance, concert dance, dance-theater, and musical-theater dance. The ultimate challenge of the course will be to develop a vocabulary to track an essentially non-verbal, ephemeral art form; we will accomplish this through considerations of how space, time, and rhythm are employed in a variety of dance works. The course is also a history of different styles of dance criticism from the early part of the 20th-century to the present. Readings will include works by André Levinson, Edwin Denby, John Martin, Arlene Croce, Marcia Siegel, Joan Acocella, Deborah Jowitt, Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Thomas DeFrantz, Ann Daly, and others. We will also study the writing in some of the major dance journals in the field among them Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, and Dance Research. The work of the course consists of essay writing, attendance at dance concerts, and visits by guest critics. Finally, the course will also consider how writing itself is akin to a choreographic endeavor.

This class introduces students to the concepts used in the new interdisciplinary field of disability studies. Dis/ability (as it is written in the field) studies argues that ?disability? is a socially-constructed set of restrictions placed on particular bodies or mentalities. Further, it suggests that all persons have experienced dis/ability as infants and will do so again (either temporarily or permanently) at some point in their lives. One way of understanding these concepts is to look at the extensive presence of people with dis/abilities in art, media and philosophy as both makers and subjects. This seminar class will be a joint exploration of the necessarily connected experience and representation of dis/ability, embodiment and the 'normal' in modern Western culture. It centers on questions of dis/ability in the three fields at three critical interfaces, namely the formation of Western rationality in the seventeenth century; the generalization and medicalization of the concept of the ?normal? in the nineteenth century; and the emergence of dis/ability as a new form of identity in the past forty years. Assessment will be based on participation and the development of a project related to one or more of the areas studied, whether practice-based or critical, by arrangement with the instructor. The class will be wheelchair accessible. Readings include Lennard Davis, The Disability Studies Reader; Helen Keller, The Story of My Life; Longmore and Umanksy, The New Disability History; Descartes, Discourse on Method.

This course is intended for Gallatin graduate students with a production component to their creative practice. At its heart, the class aims to pose difficult and productive questions that will help you understand your tendencies and priorities as an artist, the methods you employ, and where these are in the service of the work as opposed to where they stand in the way. The course starts with a series of exercises and assignments that explore the strategies and subject matter of each student in order to understand what has motivated and generated the work you have made thus far. The next set of assignments encourage you to work against the grain of the familiar to discover other solutions than the ones that might immediately appear to be the best ones. Towards the end of the terms, these various insights will be channeled into writing about your work that will be useful in the future context of an artist’s statement or project proposal essay. In the personal and lab-like atmosphere that this course hopes to cultivate, the class aims to connect Gallatin graduate students to each other’s work and practice, and to take advantage of the enormous importance that peer input can have on work in progress. Possible side effects include: getting unstuck, reengagement, enhanced motivation, collaboration.

"Clichés invite you not to think," wrote the literary critic Christopher Ricks, "but you may always decline the invitation." Clichés can be bad for language, thought, and action, in that they serve efficiency and an abstract idea of power, and lead the user away from the truth. But to avoid them entirely may be impossible. Which makes the work of the cultural critic, part of whose job is to locate and question them wherever they occur, that much trickier and deeper. In this advanced writing seminar, we will move toward an expanded and sophisticated relationship with the cliché. What is the difference between cliché and idiom, meme, tradition, trope, archetype, stereotype? Where do they live and breed? What do they accomplish? If, as Adam Phillips says, "clichés are there to stop us being suspicious," can they be much more than a writer"s bad habit--can they even be used for societal oppression? Or, conversely, can they bring people together? We will read criticism which notices the use of clichés in many forms of culture, by Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Margo Jefferson, Teju Cole, and Nuar Alsadir; we will consider extensions of the cliché in fiction (Danzy Senna), drama (Samuel Beckett), visual art (Kara Walker), poetry, music; and in algorithms and artificial intelligence. Students will write critical essays in response to the readings, as well as to current cultural or social events, paying special attention to how clichés function in the subject itself and the discourse around it.

This course is about writing, researching, and workshopping the story that you must tell, and shaping its form as a play, screenplay, novel or work of creative nonfiction. The workshop will examine approaches to creating a compelling narrative in a supportive, encouraging environment of peers striving to reach the next artistic plateau. Some of the questions that will be considered are: How much should characters reflect actual people, or be fictionalized composites? What elements can be utilized to complement and enhance the storytelling? And what ethical issues are raised in such decision-making? Whether the tales are connected to family, culture, gender or 'race' memory, there are certain strategies that may further the development of works that draw from creative imagination and historical sources. Texts may include The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, The Dramatist's Toolkit by Jeffrey Sweet, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang, and such films as Adaptation, Shadow Magic and Teza.

This course is for graduate students who wish to strengthen their creative writing skills or acquire more experience in narrative prose—stories and novels, of course, but also memoirs, essays, biographies, travel narratives, first-person journalism and any form where story is a structural element. It’s a foundational course, covering basic concepts such as structure, point of view, dialogue, character development, modes of realism, figurative language, and narrative drive, but it will also serve as a refresher for students returning to the writing process. (Students should revisit basic grammar and punctuation before the first class and be prepared to turn in technically competent work.) One primary goal is to provide a firm head start on creative projects, though for some students, this will also be a chance to assess commitment before getting in too deep. Assignments will include short weekly writing exercises, responses to NYU Classes discussions, and at least one longer piece to be discussed workshop-style and significantly revised as a final. Readings in various genres will alternate with essays on craft; assignments will include works by Alice Munro, Stephen Millhauser, Edward P. Jones, Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, Annie Dillard, John Gardner, Francine Prose, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm and Zadie Smith, among others.

Individual scenes are important building blocks of any prose narrative, yet the craft of designing a scene is often neglected by aspiring writers. In this class we will study all the aspects of designing a successful scene: setting, inner plot, inner structure, spotlight on the characters, POV, choreography of physical movement, dialogue. We will study how to write sex scenes, death scenes, party scenes, battle scenes, and nature scenes. Readings will include Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Leo Tolstoy, Elena Ferrante, James Baldwin, Roberto Bolano, Annie Proulx, Alice Munro, Sarah Waters.

Narrative, whether it's via fiction or creative nonfiction, presents challenges all throughout a piece's lifecycle, up to and including publication. In this course, which is designed for writers of both fiction and non-fiction, we'll look at three specific aspects of the fiction and nonfiction writing process; form, content and publication. In our formal studies we'll concentrate on specific areas of mastery, including the development of strong scenes and effective dialogue. We'll also use specific techniques to discover what early drafts indicate about your piece that a reader picks up on and you might not, and throughout the semester we'll survey the changing world of publication, with some trips, related assignments, and guest lecturers. Readings will include many contemporary masters of the forms, including Joan Didion and George Saunders, although most of the texts discussed will be student work, via submissions of current projects and also through assignments and in-class exercises. Students will be expected to submit for workshop at least two separate current projects for class discussion.

The slipperiness of nonfiction writing—ostensibly telling the truth in print—has, in recent years, been the subject of some handwringing in the world of writing and publishing. Jonah Lehrer made up Bob Dylan quotes? David Foster Wallace was a fabricator? Brian Williams lied? John D’Agata failed a fact-check (and then wrote a book with his fact-checker)? These are extreme examples of problems all nonfiction writers face. This nonfiction workshop asks students to try telling the truth in various forms throughout the semester, from memoir to personal essay to literary journalism. All the while, the animating questions will be what it means to tell the truth in these forms and why—or if—telling the truth matters, and whether it is even possible. Is all nonfiction the same? Is any of it ethical? Is, as Janet Malcolm says, the work of a journalist “morally indefensible?” Weekly workshops will engage ideas from readings by Joan Didion, John McPhee, Leslie Jamison, James Baldwin, John Jeremiah Sullivan, James Agee, Zora Neale Hurston, among others.

In this fiction workshop, we will identify and practice the essential technical elements of fiction writing. We will look under the hood, take the back off the clock, peer into the innards, in order to study the formal decisions necessary for effective story-telling. Our inquiry will include: point of entry; character and plot; creating meaningful scenes; interiority vs. external action; exposition; the management of time; the position of the narrator; linear v/s modular design; dialogue and its uses; conflict and resolution; image systems and so on. Fun exercises that encourage play, class readings, technique essays and student work will be points of departure for our enquiries into the internal workings of fiction. Readings include among others Sharma, Marcus, Gurganus, Bulawayo, Anam, and essays on the craft of writing by Butler, Hrijbal and Keesey among others.

How does the telling transform a story? And how can a story govern its own telling? In this course for writers in all genres, we consider diverse storytelling strategies, looking at fiction, creative nonfiction and narrative poetry, as well as theater and a few short films. Through exercises in both prose and poetry, we explore how a writer imagines a project via formal decisions about voice, genre, point of view, diction, even meter and rhyme. The intent is to move us away from comfort zones, to help us draw invention from the unfamiliar and to broaden our literary and verbal palettes, so students should be prepared to be daring, open-minded and seriously playful. (Please note that while this is not a workshop in the conventional sense, the instructor will be available during office hours to discuss personal creative projects.) Readings will include works by Amy Hempel, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Vikram Seth, Vladimir Nabokov, John Lewis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, W G Sebald, Nicholson Baker, Robert Frost, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Marjane Satrapi, David Shields and others; also films by Su Friedrich, Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger and performance work by Anna Deavere Smith and Ruth Draper.

The main goal of this course is to provide students with ways how to enhance traditional storytelling by new technologies without diminishing the role of the written word. We will examine every aspect of the craft of traditional fiction writing: plot, structure, point of view, narrative voice, dialogue, building of individual scenes, etc as well as the new techniques of the digital age: hypertext, visual and audio images, social media. We will learn how to balance the traditional with the new without overwhelming the written text with gadgets. The class will become a creative lab studying ideas by others, coming up with their own, presenting their fiction, responding to the writing of others, and discussing questions about literature, editing, and publishing in the digital age. Each student will create and present to class a work of fiction based on some of the ideas we will be discussing. The works don’t have to be in the electronic form, but the students will need to explain how they would work. Each student will create a basic website with a writer’s profile and portfolio of her works. Readings will include fiction by: Borges, Nabokov, Michael Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan.

Whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, story is an important part of prose. Story here is not just narrative but order, sequence, and structure. Learning the right order for your sentences and thoughts is as important as learning how to put one foot in front of the other when learning to walk. In this course we will explore different ways to lay out actions and ideas, whether you're writing a novel, a book of history, an opinion piece, an essay or a short story. We will examine the best ways to make notes and sketch out early drafts as you find your voice and structure. You will gain practice in rewriting. And we will look at some different approaches to story by reading such writers as Milan Kundera, Janet Malcolm, Truman Capote, George Orwell, Sigrid Nunez, and Primo Levi. Students will submit for workshop two separate projects, one a work of fiction and the other a work of nonfiction, in at least two drafts each. In the end you are expected to produce a minimum of forty finished pages.

In this workshop our aim will be to get to the heart of fiction by looking at its scaffolding. We will study the concepts important to effective story-telling: point of entry; character and plot; the problem of creating the meaningful scenes; interiority vs. external action and gesture; exposition and how much is too much; the management of time in fiction; point of view and the position of the narrator; dialogue and its uses; conflict and resolution; image systems and so on and on. Structured exercises, class readings, craft essays and each other?s stories will be used as points of departure for our enquiries into the internal workings of fiction. Expect to workshop and extensively revise least two stories/chapters this semester.

Graduate course open to advanced undergraduates (juniors and seniors) with permission of the instructor (st35@nyu.edu). This workshop is for writers ready and willing to make the time commitment necessary to produce a well-structured outline and at least the first act of a script (although students will be supported/encouraged to write a complete first draft, if possible.) We will hone our craft through writing exercises, and through screenings of film scenes which illustrate aspects of dramatic writing. The majority of our time will be spent presenting work and giving/receiving feedback (the ability to engage in collaborative discussion, and offer useful commentary, is an essential professional skill). Additionally, we will read/analyze recently produced screenplays to understand structure and how to make the story exciting ?on the page?. Although we will examine fundamentals of drama (dialogue, subtext, motivation, etc.) primarily through film study, playwrights are welcome to enroll in the workshop and consult with the instructor about supplementing the reading with plays that may inspire their work more directly. Students should come to the class with some scriptwriting experience and/or a background in acting or film.

How does the dramatist bring alive an historical epoch to enliven a work for stage, film or television? What elements are essential to create a compelling narrative? Should the characters be actual people or fictionalized composites? And what ethical issues are raised in such decision making? In this arts workshop students will embark on a journey to bring alive and shape stories that hold personal significance. Whether the tales are connected to family, culture, gender or ‘race’ memory, there are certain steps that may enhance the creation and development of dramatic work based on historical information. The goal, based on the student’ work, is the fully develop the outline of the story. Readings may include such texts as Aristotle’s Poetics, Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing, Robert McKee's Story Jeffrey Sweet’s The Dramatist’s Toolkit, and plays by David Henry Hwang, Lynn Nottage, Matthew Lopez and monologuist Michael Daisey, among others.

Creating a work based on historical characters poses specific challenges for the playwright or screenwriter. In this arts workshop, students examine ethical as well as structural and thematic questions raised in the process of tackling a story based on fact. At what point is dramatic license appropriate and/or inappropriate? How is the dramatist’s life experience best utilized in the telling of the story? Each student will identify a subject of special interest, conduct research, and create a scenario that serves as an outline for a stage play or screenplay. Readings may include works by Anna Deavere Smith, Charles L. Mee, and Alain Locke; texts such as The Big Sea by Langston Hughes, Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch, and Saint Jean by George Bernard Shaw; and films such as Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots.

The art of dramatic writing lies at the intersections of vision and voice, content and craft. This graduate level course is geared at preparing new MA students for the early stages of their journey towards writing an original work for the stage or screen. Students read, discuss, and create their own artistic statements/manifestos before moving into an examination of traditional western narrative structure (think Aristotle and The Hero’s Journey); from there, class discussions and exercises move on to complicate and repudiate that form. Readings include contemporary dramatic works (which may include Is God Is, Friday Night Lights, Barry, and many more). Supplemental texts include films, television shows, and theoretical pieces, may of which will be individually assigned according to the particular interests of each student. Each student will write an original short piece (for either stage or screen), and will come away with the seeds of what may become their thesis project.

How does a story change when re-imagined for a new medium? Why are some film adaptations more successful than others? What is the screenwriter's responsibility to the work being adapted and to its author? Should one always strive to be "true" to the source? How do screenwriters contend with elements of prose such as first-person narrative, point-of-view, authorial voice, and non-linear time? We will examine novels, short stories, memoirs, graphic novels?and the screenplays they inspired?from a screenwriter's perspective, as we consider various adaptation strategies. We will also analyze the writing choices behind what might be called "faux adaptations"?original screenplays written as if they were adaptations. A guest speaker from Volunteer Lawyers For The Arts will explain how to correctly secure rights to underlying material. Students will keep a journal, part of which may include, with instructor's approval, a short film screenplay adaptation, if the student holds the necessary rights.

The contemporary art world is replete with artists that perform or install works in public spaces as a method of provoking critical dialogue about the social, political, and economic conditions that shape modern life. In this course, you will engage with the emerging field of social practice: socially oriented research and practice by artists that includes but is not limited to urban interventions, utopian proposals, guerrilla architecture, “new genre” public art, social sculpture, project-based community practice, interactive media, service dispersals, street performance, and social media. This course examines how the idea of public space has evolved over time, up to and including considerations of virtual public space. In this course we will consider artists as members of society who intervene in and create structures of participation, frequently with the intention of changing the actual, economic and political conditions that construct social reality. We will research and produce projects about complex social sites of power like The Classroom, The Library, The Newspaper, The Walk, The Lecture, The Potluck, The Road Trip, The Party, The Salon, and The Community Center. Students will examine and discuss the work of contemporary artists such as The Guerilla Girls, Krysztof Wodiczco, The Yes Men, Martha Rosler, Rick Lowe and Suzanne Lazy. We will read and discuss the work of authors such as Lucy Lippard, Shannon Jackson, Clare Bishop, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Pablo Helguera, Nato Thompson, Greg Sholette and Grant Kester.

This history of architectural attempts to live in harmony with nature starts with turn of the century admirations for the health of primitivism and ends with the cyber punks designing new environments online. The course will first review philosophers? arguments in favor of healthy living in primitive huts, back-to-nature lovers? efforts to live according to their teaching, and the wilderness tourist industry?s ability to benefit from it. The next meetings focus on various modernist schemes for healthy homes in harmony with nature, and why these attempts often failed. The rest of the course is devoted to topics such as building ideal ecosystems for astronauts in outer space, efforts to bring space technologies (such as solar cell panels) back to Earth, alternative environmental designs of the counterculture, cyber environments, sick building syndrome, biomimetics, earth art, and other attempts to design with nature. The class will study film and artwork, and include readings by designers such as Walter Gropius, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Ian McHarg, Jon Todd, as well as scientists and commentators such as Julian Huxley, Eugene Odum, and Stewart Brand.

How do we conceptualize the world as a whole? The history of the Earth and how we came to “think globally” are the central themes of this course. We will discuss in some detail different attempts to write global environmental history. The initial focus will be the history of deforestation of the Earth, which is also a history of an emerging environmental concern for the world as a whole. The colonial legacy of natural sciences and population management will further illustrate how scholars structured the world. The course will discuss the imperial ecology of the British Empire and how its structures of knowledge survived during the Cold War. Whose knowledge and which rationality came to frame environmental thinking in recent global debates? The course will try to untangle the relationship between the “space age” and ecologists’ modeling of the world in terms of a “spaceship”. World gaming and global simulation research, such as in the Limits to Growth report from 1972 will illustrate an emerging environmental ethic of global stewardship that is of relevance to understanding current global warming debates. Readings will include Joachim Radkau, Michael Williams, Thomas Malthus, Carolus Linnaeus, Spencer R. Weart, and Garret Hardin.

This course is open to all filmmakers (fiction or non-fiction, experimental or otherwise) at all levels (beginner or advanced), but the expectation is that students will have shot a significant amount of footage prior to the course's start date and will complete a short film by the end of the course. In a collaborative workshop environment, students will work through aspects of the post-production process from screening raw footage and preparing footage for the edit, through editing and cinematic-problem-solving, to completing a short film. In addition to addressing practical concerns (editing, style, story structure, etc.), we will discuss related issues such as the importance of knowing how to situate your film within certain historical and representational paradigms. Who is the audience for your film? Where is the best “home” for your completed film? Projects may be extensions of research projects, fiction films, non-fiction films, animation, etc. Students will be required to read extensively about film history and technique, complete weekly editing/production assignments, and attend screenings outside of class hours. Over the course of the semester, every film will be given a lot of individualized attention so students are expected to engage with the variety of projects being undertaken by their peers and to participate actively in class workshops and discussions. Classes will sometimes include guest lectures by filmmakers. Students may edit on whichever platform is most comfortable and/or accessible.

Although documentaries remain a marginal genre, reality has become an increasingly vital part of modern media culture. This course explores how the likes of reality TV, blogging, internet news coverage, gossip and memoirs reorient traditional forms of rea

This course explores both theories and practices of media history and analyzes how media more generally contribute to the writing of history. We will consider how media’s ability to document the present--both in fiction and non-fiction—provides an archive of the recent past, in turn presenting the illusion of a more complete popular memory of the last century or so. In addition to parsing the relationship between history, the past, and mass media, we will consider the stakes of writing media history more broadly. What factors do we need to consider in writing about the past and how do we treat the materials that we use in our enquiries? As the media’s complexity and its own diverse stakes shape its history, we will explore divisions between social, aesthetic, cultural and technological media histories and the more business-minded institutional and economic studies. In examining the materials used to write media histories—primary and secondary sources, archival records, trade and fan press, promotional materials and social documents—we think about the problems of asserting truth, both on screens and the printed page. We will also consider the particular difficulties and significance of writing the history of popular media, especially given their seductive, if often false, claims to "reality." Readings will include selections from Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture; Phillip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory; Jon Lewis and Eric Smoodin, Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method and E.H. Carr, What Is History?

This course is intended for students who are interested in exploring Human Rights through viewing and discussing documentaries. In each class, we will view a documentary paying attention to both the subject matter and to the processes and techniques of documentary filmmaking. What makes a documentary on human rights “effective”? Do films lead to change or progress? Do they shape collective consciousness? What kinds of stories might be best told by a documentary approach? How do we, particularly in dealing with real people and situations, grapple with the ethics of creating a narrative around their stories? We will explore these questions with the help of guest filmmakers. In addition, we will explore the fundamental processes of documentary filmmaking (story, structure, editing, cinematography, music, narration, storytelling techniques) and the importance of access and luck in making such projects work.

This course is intended for students who are interested in studying and making documentary films about social change. A documentary will be screened in every class and discussion will focus on the fundamentals of filmmaking (story, structure, editing, cinematography, music, interviewing) and the importance of access and luck. While not a production course, its primary purpose is to make students more conscious of motives and methods in documentaries intended to bring about social change through the consideration of questions such as: How do documentary filmmakers construct their films in hopes of effecting social change? What kinds of stories are best told through the visual medium of film? How do documentary filmmakers deal with real people and real situations and grapple with the ethics of using the lives of others to tell their stories? A number of professional filmmakers will visit class to share their work and to talk about process, decision-making, as well as how the film industry works. In addition, students will discuss a selection of important, effective documentary films along with related readings by authors such as Freire, Coates, Kidder, Sontag and Baldwin.

Relations of looking were a constitutive part of the power dynamic that defined the colonial project, and they continue to shape (and re-shape) the postcolonial landscape in very important ways. This course brings together key texts in postcolonial studies and visual culture, while putting these readings in conversation with French and Francophone film. Among other things, the course will address the imbrications of post/colonial histories, practices of representation, and visual economies; it will use theoretical, historical, and cinematic texts to examine concepts like in/visibility, cultural imperialism, and post/colonial identity. Students will be encouraged to think about how cinematic images can be seen to intersect with, challenge, codify, and/or interrupt political and post/colonial ideologies. Authors will include Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, and Edward Said, to name a few. Filmmakers will include Gillo Pontecorvo, Jean Rouch, Ousmane Sembène, and Jean-Marie Teno, among others. Students will be assigned weekly readings, response papers, and a final research paper. It is further expected that students will watch films (every week) outside of class.

Transnational film theories consider the influence of international coproduction and economic globalization on world cinema. In this course, students will read key texts in transnational cinema studies, watch relevant films, and discuss major issues in world cinema such as citizenship, migration, diasporas, national languages, local film cultures and film festivals. Course topics will include new media, film criticism, transnational film aesthetics, Third Cinema, post-Soviet cinemas, the New Waves, translation and adaptation. Students will watch films from several time periods and genres such as road-trip, historical, border-crossing and environmental films. We will also consider film and cultural programming in international distribution networks, international film festivals and award competitions. Equal emphasis will be given to film production, distribution, exhibition and reception. At the end of the course, students will be expected to conduct original research in this emergent field of study. In their final papers, students will contribute to the growing field of transnational film theory and develop their own critical views of contemporary visual culture. Students will be assigned weekly readings, response papers and a final paper, and will be expected to watch films outside of class. Students will also be expected to attend and write a response to a local film or cultural festival that takes place during the course.

How does matter—generally thought of as the inert stuff of nature, acted upon or animated by humans—come to matter in the social, political, and ecological senses of the word? This seminar explores recent approaches to materiality across art, anthropology, feminist theory, and political ecology, an interdisciplinary constellation of scholarship often called the “new materialism.” Proceeding from political theorist Jane Bennett’s rendering of vibrancy as a thingly agency bound up with social justice, this course is an invitation to work critically with this formation in a transcultural way. We will interrogate the “newness” of the new materialism, situating its histories and genealogies in earlier phenomenological approaches to matter, while exploring its alternative lineages and contestations. Students will apply the new materialism’s diverse methodological tools for theorizing things and networks to their own practices and projects. Emphasizing graduate-level reading skills, our discussions will be based primarily on recent book-length texts, which we will work to situate within the new materialism and within their authors’ own disciplinary lineages. In addition to Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, books may include Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals, Noémi Tousignant's Edges of Exposure, and Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End.

This seminar aims to give students both a conceptual and practical grounding in the range of issues and approaches by which arts politics can be understood via the lens of NYC arts and cultural practices in the present and historically. We will think about the complexities that lie between the politics that make art and the politics that art makes—which is to say the array of forces that give rise to specific artistic practices and the agency and efficacy of artistic work. The course will be framed by the following considerations: What are the institutional, discursive, and ideological contexts that shape the objects, images, sounds or texts we call “art?” How can we actively decolonize content but also formal qualities? What are the links between cultural spaces -- the museum, the movie-theater, the gallery, the music/dance hall, the bookstore, the fashion runway, the public street, television, cyber space -- and the larger realm of politics? And how do these relationships impact, implicitly or explicitly, the ways we create, curate, study, or engage with the arts? How do consumers play an active role in the reception of artistic products and practices? What is the relation between formally promulgated cultural policy and the tacit knowledge that artists call upon to get their work into the world? How can the embodied, affective spirit of cultural practices challenge and balance entrenched power? What dimensions of the broader cultural terrain are made legible through artistic practice? What are the means through which art intervenes in the political arena? “Art” will be studied as a site of contested representations and visions, embedded in power formations -- themselves shaped by specific historical moments and geographical locations. Given contemporary global technologies, cultural practices will also be studied within the transnational “travel” of ideas and people. Such germane issues as the legal and constitutional dimensions of censorship, the social formation of taste, the consumption of stars, the bio-politics of the body, transnational copyrights law -- will all pass through an intersectional analyses of gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and nation, incorporating the insights of such areas of inquiry as decolonizing and dialogic methodologies, affect studies and embodied knowledges, queer studies, and strategizing interventions. Each session is organized around the exploration of a key question, with readings that develop conceptual and practical issues. You’ll also get to meet the Arts Politics community and through them we’ll visit key engaged spaces of the present-past/future in NYC. An approach of critical generosity and ethics of care will be cultivated.

How have museums shaped the theoretical, practical, and political concerns of anthropology as a discipline? Why does anthropology in museums matter now? In this course, we will explore these questions through an engagement with material practices of museum anthropology, broadly defined as acts of assembling, interpreting, caring for, circulating, and displaying the material world. Beginning with a history of museums in relation to anthropology in the “museum age” of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in Europe and North America, we will consider the complex colonial and modernist legacies of these institutions, and how they have shaped pervasive ideas about objects and subjects of display. Centering critical Indigenous perspectives, we will expand on the contemporary roles and relations of museum anthropology amidst globalization, environmental crisis, digital futures, and decolonization. Maintaining a materialist approach to museums as sites of cultural production, we will ask how and why innovations in museology are shifting the terms of access to and control of significant objects and stories. Through museum visits, students will explore a variety of methods for conducting anthropological research in and on museums and material culture. Alongside shorter texts by anthropologists, historians, curators, and artists, we will read several recent books on material practices in museums, which may include James Clifford’s Returns, Cara Krmpotich’s The Force of Family, and Amy Lonetree’s Decolonizing Museums.

London is a Victorian city. That is to say, the years during which Queen Victoria reigned marked its growth and development as a truly modern and global metropolis--and, in fact, as these years saw the expansion and affirmation of the British Empire, an imperial city. Charles Dickens is perhaps the most important novelistic voice of that city, producing unforgettable images of its streets, its people, and its institutions throughout his writing career. In this course, we bring them together to engage a study of a writer and his works through the exploration of the development of London as a modern urban space. We'll begin the course with Dickens' journalism and shorter fiction, setting it in the context of the rise and expansion of the periodical press, and focus our attention on some of the major urban issues that arose in the mid-century: slum clearance, education, the rise of the middle class, and environmental issues that bear on a rapidly expanding urban space, such as the need for a modern sewage system. Then, to further investigate Dickens as novelist, we will center our attention on Bleak House (1852-53) and Little Dorrit (1855-1857). Punctuating our reading and discussion of these novels, we will travel to London over spring break.

Diagnoses and discussions of individual trauma have become all but ubiquitous. And yet collective trauma has not received the same level of public attention or disciplinary development. This course seeks to track the emergent field of Collective Trauma over the last several decades. We will explore the ways in which forms of social suffering and trauma have been theorized, examined, and "treated," while critically engaging the psychological, cultural, and political implications thereof. Collective or cultural trauma is thought to emanate from cultural upheaval and formidable challenges to the social and moral order. In class and in our readings, we will attempt to map key contours of this multivalent disciplinary field and its related practices. We will explore a variety of theoretical and empirical sources, as well as case studies on topics such as: Truth commissions and reparations; intergenerational and epigenetic trauma; the Covid pandemic and mental health crises among teens; atrocity and indigenous modes of healing; memorials and the politics of memory; activism and communal healing linked to gun violence; displacement and foced migration; PTSD and sexual violence; art-based therapeutic methods; racialized modes of structural violence; climate change and community trauma, to name a few. Some of the authors/artists/activists we will explore include Didier Fassin, Gloria Anzaldua, Yael Danieli, Paul Farmer, Ta Nehisi Coates, Stef Craps, Susan Sontag, Jefferey Alexander, Franz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldua, and Judith Butler.

This is an intensive research seminar “decolonizing” knowledge and building on the students' own subaltern archival work, with the goal of producing publishable essays. As part of the "hidden" organizing work of groups excluded and marginalized from dominant normalizing political cultures, collectors and their collections are a foundational yet largely unrecognized group of cultural activists. This course will examine our own subject positions and our gleanings, visit collectors and their collections, and examine critical writings related to collecting, making presence, and the political culture of knowledge-making. Agnes Varda’s documentaries The Gleaners and I and Two Years Later will serve as a starting point for the class. Readings will likely include: essays by James Hevia, Dominick LaCapra, Bruno Latour, and Ann Stoler; and selections from: Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings, Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, Richards, The Imperial Archive, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, and Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire.

History, as most of us are taught it in the American school system, has long been written by, and for, the powerful, and historical archives are often considered fixed bases for "fact." Oral history turns these notions on their heads. While, as a cultural practice, oral history has long been utilized informally, oral history was brought into the Western academic world as an ethics and method by scholars and activists in the mid-20th century in order to infuse and nuance history with the voices and histories of disempowered groups and peoples—people of color, women, indigenous communities, differently abled people, political radicals, laborers and the working poor, and the LGBTQIA+ community. In this course, we'll engage in a critical assessment of the practice of oral history, with the goal of understanding the context of its origins and uses and examining the ethics and principles that shape it as a mode of research. We'll read and listen to exemplary oral history interviews by noted practitioners in the field, and develop relational interview skills that prize power-sharing, trust-building, careful questioning, and consider the notion of co-creativity. A core part of this course is learning The Listening Guide method, pioneered by psychologist Carol Gilligan, which we use to analyze oral history interviews; this method calls upon and hones deep listening skills, considers the relational elements of dialogue, and engages researcher/interviewers in deep self-observation and reflection about their own role and impact on both process and "result." As the capstone experience of the course, students will design, carry out, and analyze oral history interviews of their own, with a final project that can be presented as a written analysis, audio documentary/podcast, or multi-media/video. This course is particularly well-suited for students interested in history, cultural studies, psychology/social work, journalism, (auto)biographical writing, human rights, documentary production, and social movements/activism.

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine a critical debate on culture and society. We will explore theories emphasizing structural or “material” determinism, as well as intellectual currents privileging “cultural” explanations. Excessive emphasis on the cultural unhelpfully blurs the economic and other aspects of social life, while reductive fixation on economic moorings suggests subordination of social life to the structural imperatives of the market. The course proposes a nuanced understanding of human behaviors, social interactions and their forms of subjectivity. The central question will be: how are hegemonic meanings produced and made to become a “normal” part of our political, intellectual, and moral life? And how do such meaning-making processes shape the organization of spaces, policies and population within dominant discourses of modernity and development, as well as the emergence of forms of resistance to these economic imaginaries and practices. We will analyze the ‘cultural political economy’ problem, or culture and society, within four possible analytical frameworks: social science methodology; everyday life; culture and human rights; and state theory. Readings will include selections from the works of Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Amartya Sen, James Scott, Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx.

This graduate seminar will focus upon the broad question of how societies, predominantly influenced by Islamic traditions, might find a home in the modern world on their own terms. We will discuss the possibility of a critical re-thinking of certain modern conventional modes of thinking about modernity, secularism, and democracy. The class will examine notions of citizenship, religion, and globalization in societies that have been historically influenced by Islamic tradition and institutions. This will be done by way of interrogating the works of contemporary scholars of Islamic modernity, including Mohammed Arkoun, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Fatima Mernissi, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Aziz Al-Azmeh. We will explore questions that cut across the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, and law.

Students in this seminar investigate ‘community’ from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary approaches: sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, philosophy. They explore different ways community can be conceived and formed: as locality, as interest group, as action, as discourse. On one level, the course is designed for students specifically engaged in either or both analyzing and building community; on another level, it uses ‘community’ as just one example of a complex concept in the social domain, and samples the variety of ways different kinds of scholars have tried to study and theorize it. In the latter sense, the course is appropriate even for students focused on problems other than community, because it introduces them to the practice of interdisciplinary inquiry in the broad realm of social phenomena. It encourages them to grapple with the methodological differences among such broad paradigms as positivism, interpretivism, and poststructuralism, and to try out ideas and methods from each. Readings may include works by such authors as Elijah Anderson, Vered Amit, Anthony Cohen, Gerard Delanty, John Jackson, and Miranda Joseph.

This course explores scholarly debates about communities and justice. Course material covers longstanding themes such as state-society relations, democracy and political participation, emergence of political identities, grassroots and netroots, community organizing and urban governance, and social movements. Students will acquire critical literacy in social studies, including the bodies of literature mentioned above that draw on anthropology, political theory, geography and sociology. These insights should be able to inform students’ further critical engagement in the world. Particular attention will be paid to 1) how political problems both reflect and help constitute social practices, identities and inequalities, and 2) how this complex relationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘political’ is manifested on a variety of levels, from global networks and nation-states to cities, regions and local neighborhoods.

What changes in Post WWII American society led to the current economic crisis and political stalemate? For almost seven decades following World War II the United States and the industrialized Western World experienced unprecedented economic growth and geopolitical dominance. The Cold War, a period of superpower nuclear threat, tuned out unexpectedly to be a period of relative global security. The primary leader and beneficiary of the Cold War was the United States. More recently new and unforeseen eruptions of violence and major geopolitical clashes have caused threats to political stability. Mounting crises in American and European economies have brought about economic downturn, disruption and austerity, also threatening world economies. Conservative forces have reasserted their influence in American society and reignited the Culture Wars of the last four decades; American society and the world order are in radical flux. This seminar introduces the perspectives necessary for an interdisciplinary approach to social change and the our uncertain political, social and economic lives. Readings will include Dorothy Lee, Valuing the Self; Hannah Arendt, On Violence; John Kenneth Galbraith, The Good Society; Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land; John Lanchester's Why Everybody Owes Everybody and No One Can Pay; writings of Barrington Moore Jr., and economists such as Thorstein Veblen, Amartya Sen, John B. Taylor, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman.

This graduate seminar explores some of the central themes in modern Iranian intellectual history. The primary focus of the course will be the transnational circulation of intellectual discourses in contemporary Iran. Intellectual and religious ideas travel in time and space. This is the case with modern ideas, but also with ideas we consider as “traditional” or “local.” Iranian intellectual thought came to interact and overlap with Western liberalism, European and Russian social democracy, French and German Counter-Enlightenment, among others. European thought has traveled to Iran, but, Persian and Islamic traditions have also journeyed to Europe, only to then return to contemporary Iran. The cases of Ahmad Fardid, Ali Shari’ati, and Henry Corbin are conspicuous examples of the reciprocal traveling lifecycle of intellectual ideas and traditions. The course is designed to study three intellectual currents in contemporary Iran. However, we will pay special attention to how these intellectual trends overlap, mutually borrow, and share similar origins in past Iranian or European traditions.

How does identity impact historical narrative? How do communities tell their own histories, especially those that have been omitted from the historical record? What happens when communities disagree about place and placemaking? In this course, we will examine the roles of history, identity, and place as we explore the literature, the historiography, and the practices of community history with a focus on New York City. By reading some of the formative histories of different communities and putting them into dialogue with readings, including graphic novels, about identity and place, we will examine the changing nature of community given the evolving interpretations of race, class, gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. We will be collaborating with the Place Matters program of local, non-profit, Citylore, on the final project. Guest speakers may include archivists, memory workers, and public historians. Readings may include works by Benedict Anderson, George Chauncey, Kimberle Crenshaw, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Leslie M. Harris, Judith Heumann, Alison Kafer, Nell Painter, Kirk Savage, Christina Sharpe, and John Kuo Wei Tchen.

This graduate seminar will focus on the literary and political legacy of the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). We will read selections from his major works (poetry, prose, and essays) and consider major critical approaches and debates about his writings and his status in Palestinian history and collective memory.

Over the past four decades, analysis of the Iranian revolution has been constricted to the national framework. Scholars have mapped opposition actors or the Pahlavi state, while considering institutional strength or weakness (“the rentier state”, “mosque networks”, or Left parties). Even approaches seeking to foreground Islamism as a discursive tradition have slipped into Iranian exceptionalism: Shia Islamic peculiarities, clerical leadership, and Ruhollah Khomeini as a charismatic figure. This graduate seminar explores the global processes which helped and shaped the making of 1978-79 Iranian revolution. We will highlight the multiplicity of spaces of the revolution such as streets, schools, prisons, personal lives, and histories such as the Cold War and Global 1960s and 70s. We will study the Revolution within the historic context of two crucial decades leading to the demise of the old regime. This juncture reveals diverse global inspirations driving the revolution. The Iranian revolution’s global character cannot be understood except in terms of a circulatory system of flows of people and ideas between Iran, the West, Middle East, Asia, and the Soviet Union and those in Latin America.

One of the most distinctive dimensions of contemporary globalization has been the flourishing of transnational activism. Causes, organizations and activist networks have crossed borders alongside capital, goods and labor to reshape the terrain of political engagement. This class examines the enabling conditions and (intended and unintended) consequences of this turn to transnational activism in relation to other dimensions of contemporary global governance. The course will focus on human rights initiatives, including international non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and transnational campaigns such as ‘Save Darfur’. Reading important critical interventions of the last decade, the class will collectively analyze how different approaches mobilize and challenge different actors, causes and alternative imaginings of 'the global'. The course is open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Readings are likely to draw from Sydney Tarrow, Clifford Bob, Daniel Bell, Kathryin Sikkink, Sally Merry, Stephen Hopgood, Mahmoud Mamdani, Kamari Clark, Wendy Hesford and Valerie Sperling.

From Nuremberg to the South African Truth Commission, there have been many efforts to grapple with the demands of law and the persistence of memory in the aftermath of atrocity and in the name of justice. In some cases this work has been undertaken by "victim"/survivor groups, in others by the communities that bore witness to the atrocity, in yet others by the state or even by international institutions acting in the name of "humanity." This class will study the ways in which the terrain of law, legality and illegality get mobilized to advance some memories and evade others. We will look at the work of courts as well as institutions such as truth commissions, collective initiatives such as memorials, individualized interventions such as witness testimonials, literary projects and ongoing claims for reparations and redress by social movements. The class will read scholars who seek to analyze how different 'memory projects' negotiate, challenge or legitimize different actors and alternative imaginings of 'justice.' The course is open to graduate students; advanced undergraduates are permitted with the permission of the instructor. There is a lot of reading for the course —virtually a book a week for most weeks—so those interested should be motivated to dig deep in this area over the course of the semester. Readings include Sophocles, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Mark Osiel, Cathy Caruth, Saidya Hartman, Kamari Clark, Gerry Simpson, Ruti Teitel, Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Shaw and others.

For students whose programs have included investigations of the social world, this course provides an opportunity to grapple with a variety of theoretical approaches to the study of individuals, groups, organizations, cultures and societies, and to engage several methods for conducting research in those realms. Depending on students’ interests and goals, the theoretical frameworks might include behaviorism (Watson, Skinner), interactionism (GH Mead, Blumer), constructivism (Piaget, Vygotsky, Bruner), conflict (Marx, the Frankfurt School), psychodynamics (Freud, Erikson), structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss), and/or postmodernism (Foucault, Baudrillard). The class will explore the different premises, logics and arguments of various schools of thought. Moreover, members will conduct pilot-level research using methods appropriate to their problematics: e.g., ethnographic observations, interviews, discourse analysis, document study, visual anthropology, psychometric tests, and/or case studies. The course will be a useful preliminary for students expecting to do a research thesis focused on questions about the social world.

This course begins with the controversial premise that persuasion and propaganda are a necessary part of modern politics. With this approach we reject the simple project of critique and condemnation of propaganda and set for ourselves the far more difficult task of rethinking how one might create methods of mass persuasion that build democracy instead of undermining it and facilitate political discussion instead of closing it down. We begin by exploring the history of rhetoric and persuasion, and defining what we mean by propaganda. Next, we will study classic examples of propaganda produced by advertising agencies and totalitarian states. Then, as an extended case study, we will explore how photographs, speeches, architecture, murals, guidebooks and even material projects of the New Deal in the United States might suggest an alternative model of propaganda. Finally, we will use what we have learned to sketch out a set of principles for democratic mass persuasion. Authors, artists, and sites we will look at include Plato, Aristotle, Susan Sontag, Stuart Ewen, Walter Lippmann, Lizabeth Cohen, Michael Denning, Michael Schudson, Lawrence Levine, Alan Trachtenberg, Leni Riefenstahl, Joseph Goebbels, Edward Bernays, Lewis Hine, Dorothea Lange, Pare Lorentz, Woody Guthrie, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Timberline Lodge, Bonneville Dam, and Coit Tower.

“If you put on anarchist glasses," writes political scientist James C. Scott in his book Two Cheers for Anarchism, “and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle.” Using an “anarchist squint,” Scott argues, allows us to better understand more clearly informal order, submerged politics, informal regulation of markets and commons, resistance to the state, subversion of legal regimes, and other topics. It can show us, in other words, the ways that people have built order, regulated their lives, and resisted domination in ways outside and against the state. The idea of this seminar is to adopt such an “anarchist squint” and take anarchism as method for students’ varied work and so to test the utility of an “anarchist squint” for it. We will spend the term reading scholarship by people who do and do not identify as anarchists or as abolitionists, but who ask the sort of questions anarchists and abolitionists ask. These may include Scott, Colin Ward, Ursula Le Guin, Saidiya Hartman, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David Graeber, and others. Familiarity or affinity with political anarchism are unnecessary but welcome.

As part of ongoing struggle against police brutality, environmental injustice, mass incarceration and white supremacist violence, activists, artists, academics and everyday folk are wondering aloud about how antiblackness shapes the world we live in. Both plea and protest, the insistence that black lives matter activates and animates an older, yet enduring concern that centers the vexed relationship between blackness and the (properly) human. In this course we will consider what it means to treat the question of the relation between the black and the human as a radically open one. We will read widely in black studies, with an emphasis on recent literature that forwards urgent and profound critiques of humanism. Our readings--which include essays by Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Fred Moten, Joao Vargas and Zakiyyah Jackson--provide us with an occasion to consider what modes of being, politics, aesthetics and sociality are enabled or dis-abled by thinking blackness outside of the category of the human. Some of the inquiries to be foregrounded here are: What are the stakes in decoupling our study of blackness from humanism? Do the models of thinking "beyond" the human offered by post-humanism, new materialism, and animal studies inadequately incorporate a racial history that posits blacks as sub- or inhuman? What do we make of new works that rethink this history of black life alongside the live(lines)s of objects, machines and animals? Over the course of the semester we will devote much time to exploring the intricacies of this new and exciting literature, thereby deepening our awareness of why it has sparked such intense and lively discussion and debate.

Transitional justice is that subfield of human rights focused on redress of past mass atrocities in contexts of political transition through a family of mechanisms that include trials, truth commissions, reparation programs, memorials and institutional reform initiatives. Transitional justice has brought a transformation in international human rights law over the last two decades. While born in the post-World war II Nuremberg trials the field gained momentum in the early nineties when, within a five year period, truth commissions were established in countries such as Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala and South Africa; international tribunals were launched to address war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda. These initiatives were often accompanied by reparation policies for ‘victims’. Memorials were built to honor the dead, and reform proposals were enacted under the global mantra of ‘nunca mas’ or never again. This class examines the enabling conditions and (intended and unintended) consequences of this turn to transitional justice. We will look at what is at stake in different understandings of accountability and what kind of global subjects are constituted in transitional justice engagements. Reading some of the most important critical interventions of the last decade, the class will collectively analyze the normative and strategic questions regarding how different approaches negotiate, challenge or legitimize different actors, institutions and alternative imaginings of 'justice'. The course is open to graduate students; advanced undergraduates are permitted with the permission of the instructor. There is a lot of reading for the course (10 books) – virtually a book a week for most weeks– so those interested should be able to manage that reading load. This is not a survey course that provides an overview of transitional justice norms, laws and institutions. Rather, it seeks to analyze the transitional justice field through engagements with theorists from multiple disciplines, including international law, political theory, history and anthropology. Readings include Hannah Arendt, Kamari Clark, Ruti Teitel, Rosalind Shaw and others.

This course will explore social and cultural theories and practices of everyday life. We will study various theoretical approaches to the understanding of everyday realities and focus on Iran as a contemporary case study. Theories of everyday life focus on the elusive character of our reality called "everydayness," the commonplace, ordinary, familiar and generally taken-for-granted world. What are the social and cultural elements that constitute life as ordinary reality? Study of everyday life is a highly powerful representation of how physical public space can be infused with the full richness and ambiguity of the imaginary—in a material context where the future path of a society is being decided through people’s ‘innocuous’ everyday actions (gathering to drink tea or coffee, playing music, or going shopping). A ‘lifestyle’ expresses a political allegiance, however murkily and grainily understood. It is ‘below’ the level of rational discourse, in imaginatively infused habitus. We will particularly focus on the variety of everyday practices in post-revolutionary Iran under the Islamic Republic. The class starts with a brief section on the social and cultural history of modern Iran and studies important scholarly works on the Iranian Revolution of 1979. We will also examine the social and cultural changes taking place in Iran over the past three decades. Most of the course will focus on various forms of everyday life practices in Iran. Some areas of everyday life we will examine are: consumption and life style; youth and underground culture; love and sexual experiences; public and private sphere; new and old religiosity; leisure time and secularization of time; and war as an ideological practice.

Half a century after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X began discussing plans to put the United States on trial for widespread human rights violations, the inhumane conditions they witnessed persist today and now impact millions more in prisons, on parole and probation. In this course, we will use critical texts, creative writing and performance to engage the stories and lessons learned by those dehumanized incarceration in America. While critically examining texts by and about the impact and experiences of the prison industrial complex, we will research, write, record, workshop and perform original verse for the page and the stage. Our interrogation of the meanings and movements for justice will be guided by a diversity of prose, poetry, political and philosophical texts ranging from Imhotep, Plato, Aristotle and Rousseau, to Immortal Technique, Public Enemy, Assata Shakur and the RZA. Special guests will include formerly incarcerated activists, artists, educators, experts and leaders in the arts as well as in prison reform and abolition.

Contemporary Western societies are often characterized as places where the process of accumulating and consuming material goods plays an outsized role in shaping individuals, economies and cultures. Consumerism— the linking of happiness, freedom, and economic prosperity with the purchase and consumption of goods—has long been taken for granted as constitutive of the “good life” in these societies. This course takes an interdisciplinary (sociology, anthropology, history, economics and popular media) approach to consumption and how it is understood in different societies. In particular, we engage variable histories of consumption, theoretical explanations of its rise and effects, and everyday practices of consumption. We explore consumption’s role in shaping racial, class and international boundaries and examine how consumption informs how people think of their identities, of success, failure and happiness. Theorists and texts include Marx, Marcuse, Bourdieu, Bauman, Frank Trentmann, Elizabeth Chin and Jeremy Prestholdt's Domesticating the World.

The United States began the 21st century with a prison crisis unparalleled anywhere in the world. With more than seven million currently under the supervision of the criminal justice system, including over two million in jails and prisons and five million on parole or probation, the U.S. imprisons more of its population than any other nation. Women are being imprisoned at a faster rate than any other group. Children are charged as - and locked away with - adults in New York State. One out of ten Black men are incarcerated nationwide. In this course, we will examine the intersection of race, class, gender, punishment, judicial institutions, and profit-motive as we explore their impact on mass incarceration. Drawing on a growing body of both scholarly research and grassroots resources, we will explore interdisciplinary frameworks for critically examining the relationships, implications and utilities of mass incarceration. Students will collaborate on a final project analyzing a specific aspect of the 'prison industrial complex' and assessing proposed solutions. To encourage innovative approaches to research, and to link scholarship to lived experiences of incarceration, students will prepare group presentations, and have opportunities to organize and participate in correctional facility visits, performances, screenings, discussions, and arts-based workshops with formerly and currently incarcerated artists and prison activists. Texts will include Are Prisons Obsolete and Abolition Democracy by Angela Davis, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire and Theater of the Oppressed by Augusto Boal among others.

This course examines the US criminal justice system, with a particular focus on the nation's imprisonment rates and the numerous ways that the having been incarcerated affects the individual and his or her family post-release. The course explores its subject matter by drawing from a range of social science disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, and law. It also incorporates some discussion of insights from historians and philosophers. The course is designed to teach students about (a) what is known about our nation's punishment system and (b) the methodology that social scientists use in their research. The course places a strong emphasis on empirical evidence. It also places an emphasis on the policy implications of social science research. Readings may include A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor by Alexes Harris, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Insecurity by Loic Waquant, Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration by Devah Pager, The Eternal Criminal Record by James Jacobs, and US Justice Statistics by the National Research Council.

Over the last two decades Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGOs, have played an increasingly active and visible role in international aid, disaster relief, development, post-conflict rebuilding, and local governance. They have received increasing amounts of aid and development dollars, in many cases supplanting more traditional actors, like governments. They have thus provided fodder for exciting and contentious academic and public debates marked by extreme positions: Are NGOs the solution to some of the world’s most difficult problems, or are they trojan horses for neoliberal reforms? Do they represent a form of global civil society, or simply a circulation of elites? This course steps back and offers a broader perspective, by introducing students to the critical analysis of non-governmental organizations and their role in shaping global institutions and domestic political and social change. It locates NGOs within the web of transnational assemblages that they operate in, and pays attention to the experiences and practices of “local” populations that fall in and out of the category of “client.” We draw from a range of literatures to inform our analysis: democratic theory around citizenship and civil society; theories of the state; critical studies of development; and analyses of social movements, institutions and global networks. We focus on a few emblematic cases of transnational NGOs and their consequences, including Human Rights, Fair Trade, and alter-globalization NGOs.

Worlds of social dance often find their genesis among artists, rebels, non-conformists, and others who are deliberately or accidently marginal to mainstream capitalist culture. From the bordellos of Buenos Aires, where tango was born, to the honky-tonks of Nashville, to the jazz clubs of New Orleans and New York, to say nothing of contemporary raves, social dance’s roots may be found in transgressive behavior. Dancers in these scenes are often referred to as obsessed, addicted, and out of control. But whose control? In this course we examine the relation of the moving body to music and transgression, analyzing the way aesthetic styles create demimondes and subcultures that transform gender relations and public affect writ large. Beginning with theories of the aesthetic that explain the power of the body in cultural expression, we move on to examine dance worlds in their historical and ethnographic context, paying close attention to the politics of the body and its influence on changing parameters of social permissibility. We will also explore dancers’ efforts to test behaviors and assert identities outside the confines of the ordered, everyday world and consider what qualities are lost or gained when these dances become adopted for mainstream consumption. We will read works by Pierre Bourdieu, Marcel Mauss, Jacques Ranciere, Jose Munoz, Jane Desmond, Sarah Thornton, Fiona Buckland, Robert Farris Thompson, Julie Taylor, Juliet McMains, Frances Aparicio, Marta Savigliano, Barbara Browning, and Tricia Rose, among others.

How are women’s bodies and women’s labor valued in visual culture today? How are those values related to the value of women’s bodies and women’s work historically, both in the public and private spheres? Taking the glamorous figure of the runway model as our point of departure, this course explores the different kinds of labor entailed by the female-identifying body’s insistent commodification across fields of popular cultural production, with an emphasis on the fashion and beauty industries. We will put into dialogue the representational as well as material dimensions of women’s bodies in fashion, film, art and pop music, interrogating the dominant paradigms that shape female embodiment and bodywork in the 21st century. Students will learn to use political theory, sociology, feminist and media studies literatures to read recent films, ethnographies and journalistic accounts of female bodywork, while weekly current events presentations enrich our discussions. Texts include Ciara Cremin's Man-Made Woman, Linda McDowell’s Capital Culture, Iris Marion Young’s On Female Body Experience, and Ashley Mears’ groundbreaking study of the modeling industry, Pricing Beauty.

Postfeminism is an ambiguous and often contradictory term whose very indeterminacy speaks to the difficulties in understanding contemporary relationships between feminism, femininity, citizenship and identity. Positioned simultaneously as a backlash against feminism, a testament to achieved gender equality, as a reclamation of traditional feminine values and a sign of female success, postfeminism’s significance is widely felt even as its specific meanings and cultural effects appear unclear. This class will examine postfeminism’s relationship to feminism and femininity, situating all three as historically and culturally significant manifestations of the female self. Closely linked to the development of neoliberalism with its emphasis on self-reliance, choice and privatization, postfeminism is largely a product of consumer culture and mass media that have particularly consequences for feminine identities and gender relations. This course will look at popular women’s media from the makeover show, to fashion magazines and blogs, chick films and television drama to explore how they manage tradition and promote a more privatized and commercial feminine self, negotiating the relationship between family responsibilities and more laissez faire ideas of female success and self-actualization.

Racialized media narratives about migrants and the “migration crisis” have transformed politics in the US, but also across much of the world in the past several years. In this course, we will think through the current moment of crisis by examining the historical and structural causes of modern migration, forced dispossession and displacement. We will locate the current crisis in much longer histories of settler colonialism, transatlantic slavery, forced migration and indenture that have shaped modern political struggles over race, nationality and citizenship. We will then turn to the role of media across platforms and technologies in surveilling and policing on the one hand and setting the limits on the other, of 21st century public understandings of national belonging and claims to citizenship within and beyond borders. Finally, the seminar will focus on migrant-led movements for civil rights, sanctuary and open borders. The seminar draws from the growing inter-disciplinary scholarship in critical migration studies including Anthropology, History, Sociology, Geography, Media and Cultural Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Readings may include: Browne, Simone (2015) Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness; Jodi Byrd (2014) The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism; Ngai, Mae M (2014) Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Reece Jones & Mathew Coleman (2019), Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement; Gregory, D. (2004). The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ghassan Hage, (2017) Is Racism an Environmental Threat?; Leo Chavez (2013), The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation; Robyn Magalit Rodriguez (2010) Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World

This course will examine how poetic thought and practice shapes notions of history, self, collectivity, and change in South Asia and the Middle East. The course considers “poetic knowledge” as a term that might encapsulate the value and meaning of the poetic as a mode of being, seeing and doing in the world. We will delve into the breadth and depth of non-Western literary thought, theory and practice in South Asia and the Middle East, reading key texts by poets, historians, and anthropologists including A. K. Ramanujan, Ann Gold, Lila Abu-Lughod, Steve Caton, and Sheldon Pollock. Alongside, we will read selected, poetic texts in translation from a variety of languages including Braj, Urdu, Persian, Sindhi, and Punjabi. Course themes include poetic knowledge as a reflection on history and society, gender and power in poetic traditions, poetry and political critique, and the relationship between poetic idiom and spiritual subjectivity.

The continued existence of poverty amidst plenty is one of the most vexing problems of our times. How can we foster equality and inclusion in a democracy, and in ways that preserve the beneficial incentives that emanate from a free marketplace? As a general rule, those who lack money or power must be subservient to acquire the resources they need to survive. But while subservience can ensure survival, only resistance, subversion, and creativity can foster sustained inclusion. In this course, students examine how individuals and collectives can resist the concentration of economic and political power and create new ways to foster inclusion and shared prosperity within firms, markets, cities, and nation-states. Drawing on case studies from both the Global North and Global South, we examine successes and failures of these strategies, and the lessons we can learn from them. The course is both idealistic and pragmatic; while it invites students to imagine a better world, it anchors the discussions on real-life examples of inclusionary strategies and action, using them to shed light on the kinds of interventions that might deliver concrete and positive results. Principal readings will cover the basic discussion of collective action and social movements for the first third of the course (for example, Mancur Olson’s “logic of collective action,” Elinor Ostrom’s “Governing the Commons” and James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak and Cloward and Piven, Poor People’s Movements), and then case studies across firms, cities, markets, and nation-states (such as Heller’s The Labor of Development, Burawoys’ Manufacturing Consent, Whyte’s Making Mondragon, Elizabeth Warren’s “Unsafe at Any Rate,” Coslovsky’s “ SINP and Reverse Regulatory Capture” and Baiocchi’s Militants and Citizens).

How do we represent historical events graphically? How can we use drawing to practice paying attention to historical images? How do we generate new perspectives when telling histories with multiple narratives? Similar to the impact that The 1619 Project has had by reaching a broader audience, could graphic histories raise the visibility of previously marginalized stories and allow us to rethink long-held beliefs about our past? In this methods-focused course, we will read and analyze historical scholarship and graphic histories in a case- study approach in order to determine how best to work with primary sources to create our own graphic histories with diverse representation. This course relies on the philosophy and techniques of Lynda Barry and Ivan Brunetti with the underlying belief that anyone can draw. No prior drawing experience is required. Readings may include works by Kyle Baker, Meg-John Barker, Jason Eaglespeaker, Ebony Flowers, Rebecca Hall, Ken Krimstein, Nora Krug, John Lewis, Scott McCloud, Eric Orner, Frank “Big Black” Smith, Anna Veltfort, and Gene Leun Yang. Guest speakers may include authors, illustrators, historians, publishers, and visual storytellers.

This studio-based design course offers students the opportunity to conceptualize, plan, and test urban design scenarios and solutions on variously sized tracts of land. Throughout the semester, students will be introduced to different building types, vehicular requirements, transportation integration, and regulatory frameworks that all affect design decisions. Additionally, students will study the interaction of costs and design, and the methodology a developer might use when deciding whether or not to pursue a project. Students will work individually and in teams on four separate and sequential "sketch" problems. At the completion of each problem, students will present their work at a class review session. During the semester students will also be asked to review various historic plans, and to make presentations and critiques of these plans. Familiarity with digital design software is an advantage, but is not required.

“The Art of the Psalms in Medieval European Culture” is a team-taught graduate seminar designed to introduce students, including doctoral candidates, master’s students, and BA/MA students across a range of departments and programs, to the study of the Old Testament Book of Psalms, with particular interest in its collection, dissemination, interpretation, and illustration in medieval manuscripts from roughly the fifth through fifteenth centuries CE. Taught by Kathryn A. Smith (Department of Art History) and Andrew Romig (Gallatin School of Individualized Study), the course takes a multi- and inter-disciplinary approach to medieval cultural study. We will regard the Book of Psalms as a text that was used and reused for multi-layered purposes throughout the European Middle Ages. We will consider the ways in which the Book of Psalms served as an object of and vehicle for veneration, commemoration, and pictorial innovation. We will explore how it both facilitated the expression of cultural identity and served as a means of intercultural connection between contemporary communities and their collective pasts. Finally, we will define “Psalm Art” as broadly as possible, so as to include not only the calligraphic presentation and pictorial illustration of the Psalms, but also the poetics of the Psalms themselves, the arts of translation and exegetical interpretation, and the devotional practices that placed the Psalms at the center of spiritual life for professional and lay Christians alike for more than a millennium. While the course has its foundations in the fields of literature, history, and art history, as well as the study of medieval manuscripts as material artifacts, readings will invite students to use the Psalms as a case study for a wide range of methodological and theoretical pursuits – the history of emotions, gender studies, literary theory, theology, and philosophy, to name just a few. Students will have the opportunity to examine manuscripts in local collections (the Morgan Library, the Columbia University Rare Book Room, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library) and to examine works in both digital and paper facsimile.

According to many twentieth-century scholars, as the Western world continued to advance scientifically, industrially, and economically, religions and religious beliefs would gradually fade away. While that may have been somewhat true in a few European countries, in most of the West, in particular the Americas and the United States, religion continues to play a major role. To understand America, in the 21st century—the political, educational, philosophical, artistic, and social—requires some understanding of the roles that religions play. In this course, we will look at multiple communities, belief systems, institutions, and practices. While we will look at traditional institutions and texts, the main focus of this course will be on the everyday experiences of people and the ways their lives intersect with religion: what scholars call “lived religion.” Topics will include the decline of mainstream congregations and the rise of the evangelical, as well as the emerging visibility of queer theologies, pagan communities, and other new religious movements. We will examine the growing religious identification as “spiritual but not religious” and as “none.” We will look at the religious underpinnings of political movements from Islamophobia to Black Lives Matter to trans rights to Donald Trump. Readings will include texts taken from within these movements, within the popular media, and theoretical analysis from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Scholarly readings will include works by Talal Assad, Saba Mahmood, Ann Pellegrini, Robert Orsi, Graham Harvey, Jeffrey Stout, Cornell West, Mark C. Taylor, Tyler Roberts, Marcella Althaus-Reid, and others.

This course will explore the nature and influence of the Greek tragic theater in generating theatrical forms that enabled writers in later periods to dramatize tragedy’s central philosophical and theoretical questions, and to theorize drama itself. Athenian State Theater developed a dramatic form -- tragedy -- that paid its dues both to epic and to ritual, and formalized a space for exploring the complex relations of kinship, eros, gender, the polis, thought and desire. This course grounds itself in ancient Greek tragedy and pursues its afterlives and aftershocks in the early modern and modern periods, in drama, philosophy, and film. Tragedy was never without its others—its accompanying satyr play, comedy, philosophy: Euripides in particular is among the most influential explorers and exploders of the genre, and the course will take a special look at his role in shaping early modern ideas of tragedy and tragicomedy. Throughout we will attend to historical situation, rhetorical resources, genre as category, and questions of the mediation of the tragic in later periods. As a space for our own speculations about the intersections of theory and drama, the course will include readings from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Shakespeare, Racine and Beckett, and will give some attention to modern film interpretations of works by these playwrights, including Pasolini’s Medea, Kozintsev’s King Lear, and Kurosawa’s Ran; theoretical readings will include Aristotle, Hegel, Nietzsche, Vernant, and Butler. The idea of “Thinking with Tragedy” is to build in a space for uncovering the exfoliations of tragedy into other genres and forms, and for speculation on the generative power of tragedy for aesthetic theory.

This course will focus on The Faerie Queene in its wider literary context, including selections from classical epic (Vergil, Ovid), Ariosto, Tasso, and Cervantes. Readings in theory of allegory and ideology will complement a focus on epic. We will explore the relation of pastoral and epic, placing pastoral moments in The Faerie Queene against selections from The Shepheardes Calendar and from Vergil and Theocritus. Some attention will be paid to the visual tradition of representing epic and allegory, including mythological paintings, emblem books, iconography and Renaissance mythography (Cartari, Conti and others). We will rethink the convergences and divergences of epic, allegory and romance as they help to shape questions of gender, nation, ideology and ethics.

This course will explore the plays of Shakespeare and other early modern English dramatists in a broad Mediterranean context, including fictions from the Italian novellatradition, Renaissance Italian and Spanish comedy and tragicomedy, several plays by Plautus set in the northern and eastern Mediterranean, captivity narratives and materials on Ottoman and North African relations. The class will look at questions of race and racialization in relation to questions of religion and empire, and at the emergence of Shakespearean comedy and “romance” or “tragicomedy” in relation to Italian, classical and Spanish precursors and contemporaries. Readings will probably include non-Shakespearean English dramas such as The Battle of Alcazar (George Peele), A Christian Turned Turk (Daborne), The Renegado and The Bondsman (both by Massinger), The Deceived (by the Italian Sienese humanist academy The Intronati), and Cervantes’ “The Bagnios of Algiers” or “The Great Sultana.”  A selection will be made from the following plays by Shakespeare: Comedy of Errors, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. We will draw on recent scholarship on race, religion, and transnational theatrical intersections including Black Lives in the English Archives by Imtiaz Habib and Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, eds Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba, and work by Daniel Vitkus, Nabil Matar, Barbara Fuchs, Ayanna Thompson, Jonathan Burton, Ania Loomba and Dennis Britton, among others.

In January 1995, Antanas Mockus became Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. Over two non-consecutive terms of three years each, he assumed the challenge of governing a city in crisis, disrupted by chaos, corruption, and violence. He did so by fostering a cultural transformation through attention to pedagogy, public policy, and art—an approach to governing that he calls “Citizenship Culture.” This course examines theoretical, governmental, and public discussions around individual behaviors that have a collective impact—both desirable (like saving water or paying voluntary taxes) and harmful (law-breaking, tax evasion, and intolerance). During the course, students at NYU will work on collaborative projects with graduate students in Vilnius, Lithuania, and Bogota, Colombia. We will begin by reviewing the case of Bogotá. We then use readings on politics and public policy to generate reflections on the relationship between social structure, civic culture, and individual decision-making. Course material may include readings by Jürgen Habermas, Basil Bernstein, John Elster, Doris Sommer, Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel.

The primary objective of the course is to provide students with a working knowledge of the historiography of the history of science, medicine, and technology. The course is organized around some of the major themes and readings in the field. Since complete coverage would be impossible, the course strives to provide a mix of classic texts and more recent scholarship in an effort to familiarize students with the methods, objectives, and research techniques employed by historians of science, medicine, and technology. While all students are welcome to take this course, this graduate seminar will prepare those interested in preparing for an exam in the field.

The rhythm known as the habanera, recognized as the first written music based on an African motif, has zigzagged around the globe for centuries. In this course we will pay close attention to how and why this syncopation pattern, believed to originate in the premodern kingdom of Kongo, today manifests in a wide range of musics--from opera to afrobeats. Team taught by an Afro-Cuban musician and a black diaspora cultural historian, and offered in conjunction with a series of evening seminars featuring renowned scholars, musicians and DJs, this colloquium organizes a central question--what does it mean to hear diaspora? Master classes and listening assignments are designed to build proficiencies with respect to various genres (including, but not limited to ragtime, reggaeton, tango, son, samba, zouk, kizomba, bolero and bachata) and encourage students to experiment with thinking through music. Readings and discussions foster cultural literacies and ask us to consider how contact, circulation, and commodification relay a rhythm that carries a place name to so many different places in the world. The transatlantic traffic in slaves, travel, trade, work, war, migration and music industry marketing figure prominently here. How does this va y ven of people and objects, ideas and sounds oblige us to seriously (re)think notions of intangible heritage and sharpen our awareness of the creative and affective forces that shape and sustain afro diaspora’s musical cultures?