UBC a place of mind THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice Faculty of Arts Buchanan Tower 1097 - 1873 East Mall Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1 Phone 604 822 9171 Fax 604 822 9169 This course is taking place on the unceded, ancestral, and traditional territory of the haniaminam-speaking "maOk"ayam (Musqueam) people. GRSJ 224C: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice in Literature Term 1-2: Sept. 5-Apr. 11 Meeting time: T/Th 12:30-2:00 Location for classes: Buchanan B141 Instructor: Email address: Office: Office hours: Rusaba Alam (she/ her) rusaba.alam@ubc.ca Buchanan Tower 1005 Thursday 2:00 to 3:00 or by appointment COURSE DESCRIPTION Strangers and Kin "Stretching the metaphor, we might say that one goes in search of a 'homeland' that is as sufficient to the needs of strangers as of kin." -Hortense Spillers, "All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race" This course takes up relationality and interdependence as major themes of queer, feminist, and anti-colonial writing. Despite this focus, much of the work we will encounter takes a critical approach to the family and to normative social arrangements. Tracking an ambivalent relationship to kinship across poetry, fiction, and theory, we will explore defamiliarization and denaturalization as modes of imagining social transformation. Our aim is to engage with these varied genres of writing at the level of both content and form in order to practice the foundational skills of literary studies: close reading and textual analysis. You can expect to do a fair amount of reading for this class, but you need not have prior knowledge of theory or experience in a university literature course. Together we will work to develop our understanding of a key aesthetic strategy of radical writing, that of the critical encounter with difference as practice of freedom. Books ordered at UBC Bookstore: Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline Larissa Lai, Iron Goddess of Mercy Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O'Brien, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 Dates Week Required readings Assignments
Sept. 7 1 No class Sept. 5 (Imagine Day) Sept. 12, 14 2 Sept. 19, 21 Sept. 26, 28 4 Oct. 3, 5 Oct. 10 No class Oct. 12th (Make-up Monday) Oct. 17, 19 7 Oct. 24, 26 Oct. 31, Nov. 2 In-class poetry analysis assignment Sept. 28 . Sophie Lewis, "Covid-19 Is Straining the Concept of the Family. Let's Break It" (online in The Nation) · Chrystos, Not Vanishing preface (pg. 1 of pdf), dedication (pg. 59 of pdf), and the following poems: "Maybe We Shouldn't Meet If There Are No Third World Women Here," "Meditation for Gloria Anzaldúa," "I Have Not Signed a Treaty With the U.S. Government," "White Girl Don't," and "Let Me Touch" · Interview with Chrystos by Jorge Antonio Vallejos (online on Black Coffee Poet) 3 · Not Vanishing (the rest of the book) · Not Vanishing (continued) · Cheryl Suzack, "Transitional Justice, Termination Policies, and the Politics