Special Topics in the Humanities (370-6-21)

Topic

Why Can't We Be Friends?

Instructors

Ishan Mehandru

Meeting Info

Kresge Cent. Hall 2-380 Kaplan: Mon, Wed 9:30AM - 10:50AM

Overview of class

We live in an age where friends are rapidly disappearing. On social media, friends have been replaced by ‘followers'. In increasingly precarious job markets and workplaces, we are pitted to compete against (both artificial and human) ‘colleagues' and ‘co-workers'. Queer relationships, once overflowing with blurred boundaries between friends and lovers, are becoming neatly organized into legal and paralegal vocabularies of primary and secondary ‘partners'.

This course inquires if friendship can still be imagined as a site for political and interpersonal solidarities outside of traditional kinships. Our explorations will be guided by a counter-cultural archive of artist, activist, and informal collectives formed in the backdrop of historical flashpoints like the HIV-AIDS epidemic, the Covid-19 pandemic, and authoritarian and repressive regimes in colonial India, rural Iran, and contemporary US. We will go through memoirs, novels, Hollywood and South Asian rom-coms and "buddy" films, manifestos, and documentaries emerging out of insurgent feminist, queer, and trans* collectives. Together, we will ask if friendship can help us navigate the perils and pleasures of loneliness, desire, and joy in increasingly neoliberal and individualized times? Or does this dreamy and utopic bond collapse in a world riven by hierarchies of race, religion, caste, and class?

Teaching Method

Class discussion and reflection pieces. Assignments will consist of short in-class reading and writing exercises, barring a single conversational essay that will be written across the midterm and final exams. The focus of this class will be on collective and collaborative learning.

Class Attributes

Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
Literature & Fine Arts Distro Area