Terror and Freedom

This course will consider some of the ways in which terror has come to define contemporary politics and how this speaks to very core of what it means to be human in the modern West and beyond. We will begin with Sylvia Wynter’s reimagination of the human as a conceptual category, which underscores the ontological dimension of terror as it is scripted on and through those subjects (black people, natives, the insane, the poor, etc.) violently excluded from western humanity. Then we will analyze the particular configurations of modern terror in some supposedly “exceptional” locations, such as slave plantations, colonies, prisons, and Nazi death camps. Finally, the course will think about how political violence has given rise to ongoing practices of freedom, especially within black cultural contexts, but also within other traditions of the oppressed.

Texts:

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual

Gilmore, Golden Gulag

Hartman, Scenes of Subjection

Kelley, Freedom Dreams

Moten, In the Break

Schedule

Week 1

Introduction

Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory,” Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Agamben, Homo Sacer (selections).

Recommended: Wynter, “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism,” Weheliye, “After Man.”

Week 2

Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Gilroy, Against Race (“Modernity and Infrahumanity”), Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (selections), Judy, “Planetary Violence.”

Week 3

Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (selections), Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers (selections), Madmani, “Modernity and Violence,” Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity.”

Week 4

Hegel, “Terror and Freedom,” Du Bois, “The General Strike,” Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” Fanon, “Concerning Violence.”

Recommended: Derrida, “The Force of Law (Part 2)” and Butler, “Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s Critique of Violence.”

Week 5

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Jews and Society, Race Thinking Before Racism, The Decline of the Nation-State, Total Domination, and Ideology and Terror) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (selections).

Recommended: Mbembe, “Faces of Freedom,” Grosse, “From Colonialism to National Socialism to Postcolonialism: Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Film: From Swastika to Jim Crow (available from NU media library).

Week 6

Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (Chapter 4&5), Esmeir, “On Making Dehumanization Possible,” James, Renegades, Mariners, Castaways (conclusion), Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (selections).

Week 7

Gilmore, Golden Gulag (Prolog, Introduction, Chapters 3, 5, and 6), Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual.

Recommended: Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy

Week 8

Woods, Development Arrested (selections) and McKittrick, Demonic Grounds (Chapters 4&5 and conclusion).

Recommended Film: Spike Lee, When the Levees Broke

Week 9

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (Introduction and Chapter 2), Moten, In the Break (Resistance of the Object), Farley, “The Black Body as Fetish.

Week 10

Kelley, Freedom Dreams and Moten, In the Break (Visible Music), Hartman & Best, “Fugitive Justice.”

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