This course will ask students to think critically about work and labor in various U.S. contexts, while introducing them to key concepts in late twentieth-century Italian social theory. Topics may vary from semester to semester, but the course will always take substantial account of the experiences and histories of representations of different ethnic groups.

In this class we consider the socio-political horizon of work, and the beyond of this horizon. What if work didn’t define and divide us? Why, in an age of the technological means to eliminate work, do we continue to imagine a minimum of forty hours of work per week per person as necessary and proper? What are the repercussions of this dominant outlook, and what socio-political possibilities does it obstruct? Since the 1970s, Italian Marxist and Marxist feminist theories have explored these questions and suggested compelling answers. We bring these theories into conversation with the US American context as a nerve center of compulsory work and work-worship. How do the myth, the ethic, and the reality of work in the US context contribute to the production and reproduction of racial and cultural categories under capitalism? Bringing together fictional and non-fictional literature and film from diverse US perspectives—Black American, Asian American, and European American—and from diverse sectors of work—material and immaterial; productive, reproductive, and affective, including sex work—with these Italian social theories, we examine the injunction to work as fundamental to sowing and maintaining social inequities and iniquities, and consider how the politicization of our working lives yields, on the other hand, liberatory potentials. Among other texts, we will explore writings by W.E.B. Du Bois, Nanni Balestrini, Ed Park, Silvia Federici, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten; and films by Elio Petri, Charles Burnett, Lizzie Borden, and Andrea Arnold.

Taught in English with readings in English. No prerequisites.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills