Required of all Ph.D. students. Advanced study in various fields, leading to a substantial piece of writing. Offerings vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for offerings well before the beginning of the semester.

The seminar will open with an overview of interwar communism and fascism, taking as our starting point Walter Benjamin’s famous distinction between the aestheticized politics of fascism and the politicized art of communism. We will see how Benjamin, other members of the Frankfurt School and their interlocutors understood this distinction and the broader relationship between aesthetics and politics. We will then survey recent efforts (e.g., by Wendy Brown and Enzo Traverso) to draw similarities and contrasts between the interwar period and our current conjuncture.

The seminar will then turn to diasporic authors engaging the far left and right in order to counter local instances of discrimination, and to articulate alternatives to western empire and racial capitalism. The aim here will be to identify ways of conceptualizing race able to navigate past and present political extremes--from the interwar years, to postcolonial authoritarianism and Third Worldism, to our current culture wars as well as Putinist civilizational struggle. Through figures like Aimé Césaire, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Claude McKay, and Viktor Tsoi, we will identify several concepts for thinking across racial and political binaries--not to posit equivalence between left and right, but (in the spirit of Ernst Bloch) to channel the allure of reactionary thought and aesthetics toward reliably progressive ends.

Repeat Rules