Recent Graduate Seminars

This course explores a neglected encounter in the academy’s interest in theories of the posthuman--either from the paradigms of ecological animal studies, technology, bio-genetics, and medicine, or critical disability studies: the relationship between the posthuman and race. While theories attempting to move beyond the human/non-human divide often dissolve or deny differences of race, critics of color ranging from Frantz Fanon and Paul Gilroy to Frank Wilderson and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson have demonstrated how theories of the human always imply a logic of race. This course will trace the early modern roots of race in popular humanist discourses, joining early modern texts to contemporary theoretical writing and cultural productions. Taking a historicized approach, we will read a range of early modern texts that seek, implicitly or explicitly, to define the limits of the human in relation to categories of the divine, the animal, and the inanimate. We will trace the uneven process by which the human assumed a hierarchical distinction within the realm of nature, how this hierarchy became manifested through new perspectives on the relationship between human and world, and the origins of further categorical distinctions such as kind, species, personhood, and race. We will also consider theories of disability and emerging questions about what abilities or characteristics make a person more or less human. In uncovering a history of human ontologies that is powerfully fueled by Renaissance humanism but that also transcends such periodization, we will seek to uncover the ways in which ontological and anthropocentric understandings of the world intersect with the long history of race. 

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In early modern texts ranging from philosophical treatises and travel writing to stage plays and utopian fictions we will encounter not only humans, animals, and gods, but also creatures, monsters, fairies, beasts, and unnamed hybrid beings. Do these text reveal a posthuman Renaissance or does such a claim merely seek to rescue or glorify Renaissance humanism and obscure its complicity in the history of race? How can we practice early modern scholarship in ways that are accountable to our present world? What happens when we take early modern writings as a context for approaching the Anthropocentric tragedies of Octavia Butler and Indra Sinha, or when we examine the continuities between The Tempest and The Shape of Water? Surveying theoretical texts ranging from Descartes and Darwin to Rosi Braidoitti, Calvin Warren, and Kathryn Yusoff, we will seek to take stock of what is gained and lost by the posthuman theoretical move. We will also consider how understandings of the human inform a philosophy of human rights and ethics--engaging the ideas of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as Crystal Parikh and Jasbir Puar. Finally, we will think about what specific questions are brought to bear on the posthuman by critics of race and colonialism, as well as gender and sexuality, and whether these theoretical approaches might be reconciled. 

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Required Texts:

Shakespeare, The Tempest  

Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species 

Margaret Cavendish, Blazing World

 Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

 Indra Sinha, Animal’s People

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

 Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

Michel de Montaigne, “The Apologie for Raymond Sebond” 

Rene Descartes, The Discourse on Method 

Selections from Jose de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies  

Selections from Edward Long, History of Jamaica  

Richard Wright, “Between the World and Me”

Frantz Fanon, “The Fact of Blackness” from Black Skin, White Masks 

Hannah Arendt, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man” 

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