South Asian Societies (375-0-20)
Topic
Inhuman Conditions
Instructors
Kalyan Nadiminti
Meeting Info
Fisk Hall 114: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
AY25. Over the last decade, posters announcing "Refugees Welcome Here" have appeared across the American landscape. The post-9/11 era has seen the displacement of 38 million people over the Middle East and North Africa due to the ever-escalating effects of US militarism, not to mention the thousands of civilians who have died in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and surrounding regions. Against the backdrop of what Afghan anthropologist Anila Daulatzai calls "serial war," what does the figure of the refugee tell us about the status of human rights in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? In other words, what are human rights and why do we care about them? Who gets to be a human and who doesn't? Beginning with fiction from the mid-to-late twentieth century, this course examines the dialectical logic of dispensation and denial of human rights through literary texts across nations and genres. We will employ the lens of political theory around race, citizenship, territory, and the category of the human across global sites like Kashmir, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Palestine, Mexico as well as detention sites like Guantánamo, and Manus Island. The course problematizes an investment in the rhetoric sympathy and sentiment to unlearn what Didder Fassin calls "humanitarian imperialism," instead asking what it means for human rights subjects to make demands, rather than petitions, for protection from torture, genocide, and extralegal violence. We will read fictional as well as nonfictional accounts by global authors to consider key figures such as the refugee, the undocumented migrant, the detainee, and the animal as instantiations of what Giorgio Agamben calls "homo sacer," i.e. the human who remains outside of a polity as a sacrificial surrogate against the safe haven of the settler/citizen within. Students will be introduced to scholars working in the intersections of political theory, human rights, and literary studies such as Judith Butler, Joseph Slaughter, Achille Mbembe, Sonali Thakkar, and others.
Class Materials (Required)
Bessie Head, Maru ISBN-13 : 978-1478607618
Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost ISBN-13 : 978-0375724374
Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator ISBN-13 : 978-0141048581
Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends ISBN-13 : 978-1566894951
Jerome Tubiano, Guantánamo Kid ISBN-13 : 978-1910593660
Selections from Jamil Jan Kochai, The Haunting of Haji Hotak and Other Stories (Canvas) ISBN-13 : 978-0593297216
Class Attributes
Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area
Global Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity