Course Description:

This is a Semester- long  lecture series consisting of three autonomous blocks of Readings around lectures delivered by visiting speakers at  CalArts or Moca. In the 2011 Spring semester,  the course will host  the following speakers: Ali Behdad ( Ali Behdad is John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature and Chair of English Department at UCLA); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ( Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities and Director, Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University); and Ananya Chatterjea ( Associate Professor and Director of Dance at the University of Minnesota).As in previous years, the Lecture Series will emphasize three different fields of study: aesthetic and political theory, social and political critique, and political art.  Students are required to attend both the lectures and the weekly course meetings, a one page weekly reading response paper  dealing with the readings for that week  and a final paper towards  the end of the semester.

Course Goals

1. Introduce students to the work of three major contemporary thinkers, focusing specifically  on the crossover of aesthetics and politics in their work.
2. Introduce students to different ways of thinking about the crossover between aesthetics and politics.
3. Introduce students to three debates in contemporary critical  theory: on  questions of representation, translation and resistance

Required Texts

1. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman,  Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader Columbia Univ. Press, NY 1994
2. Ananya Chatterjea,  Butting out: reading resistive choreographies, Weselyan Univ. Press:CT 2004
   
3. Spivak , Selected readings on line.