COMPLIT 361: Comparative Methodologies in Black Gender Studies (AFRICAAM 361, COMPLIT 261, FEMGEN 362)
This course takes a comparative methodological approach to Black Gender Studies, introducing students to the important terms and debates that animate this field, such as Spillers' "ungendering" and Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation". We will read academic articles, book chapters, and exhibition materials in the fields of literary criticism, history, anthropology, gender studies, and fine art that trace Black Women's and gender expansive people's experiences across the Western Hemisphere. The purpose of this course is to aid graduate students in growing as theorists in their own fields by engaging with the methodologies and terms present in contemporary Black queer and gender studies. We will also learn to conduct historical scholarship via archival sources. Particular attention will be paid to scholarship published in the past decade, especially as it relates to performance, literary criticism, and expansive gender throughout the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.This course is by application only. Please send a statement of interest and your CV to mlrosa@stanford.edu.
Last offered: Winter 2023
| Units: 3-5
COMPLIT 364: Solidarity - Histories, Literatures, Rationales (COMPLIT 164, CSRE 164)
This course studies moments in history where ordinary forms of immediate political interest give way to a more capacious sense of obligation and commitment. With close readings of literary texts we will critique and analyze these moments to understand better their complexities and contradictions. Cases include Spanish Civil War; South African apartheid, Ukraine, Palestine.
Last offered: Winter 2025
| Units: 3-5
CSRE 63N: The Feminist Critique: The History and Politics of Gender Equality (AMSTUD 63N, FEMGEN 63N, HISTORY 63N)
This course explores the long history of ideas about gender and equality. Each week we read, dissect, compare, and critique a set of primary historical documents (political and literary) from around the world, moving from the 15th century to the present. We tease out changing arguments about education, the body, sexuality, violence, labor, politics, and the very meaning of gender, and we place feminist critics within national and global political contexts.
Last offered: Autumn 2020
| Units: 3-4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI
CSRE 124B: German Jews: Thought, Race, and Identity (GERMAN 124, JEWISHST 124)
This course offers an introduction to German Jewish thought from the 18th century to the present day. We will explore the way Jews in the German-speaking world understood their identities in the face of changing cultural and political contexts and the literary and philosophical works they produced in the face of antisemitism, discrimination, and genocide. This course covers the major themes and events in German-Jewish cultural history, including the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), fin de si'cle Vienna, Zionism, exile and migration, the Holocaust, and the modern German Jewish renaissance, with readings from Moses Mendelsohn, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Max Czollek, and more. We will pay special attention to the way the German Jewish experience challenges our understanding of identity categories such as race and religion, as well as concepts of whiteness, Europeanness, and the modern nation state.
Last offered: Spring 2024
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
CSRE 133E: Literature and Society in Africa and the Caribbean (AFRICAAM 133, COMPLIT 133, COMPLIT 233A, FRENCH 133, JEWISHST 143)
This course provides students with an introductory survey of literature and cinema from Francophone Africa and the Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will be encouraged to consider the geographical, historical, and political connections between the Maghreb, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa. This course will help students improve their ability to speak and write in French by introducing students to linguistic and conceptual tools to conduct literary and visual analysis. While analyzing novels and films, students will be exposed to a diverse number of topics such as national and cultural identity, race and class, gender and sexuality, orality and textuality, transnationalism and migration, colonialism and decolonization, history and memory, and the politics of language. Readings include the works of writers and filmmakers such as Aim Csaire, Albert Memmi, Ousmane Sembne, Lela Sebbar, Mariama B, Maryse Cond, Dany Laferrire, Mati Diop, and special guest 'onora Miano. Taught in French. Students are encouraged to complete
FRENLANG 124 or successfully test above this level through the Language Center. This course fulfills the Writing in the Major (WIM) requirement.
Terms: Aut
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
CSRE 164: Solidarity - Histories, Literatures, Rationales (COMPLIT 164, COMPLIT 364)
This course studies moments in history where ordinary forms of immediate political interest give way to a more capacious sense of obligation and commitment. With close readings of literary texts we will critique and analyze these moments to understand better their complexities and contradictions. Cases include Spanish Civil War; South African apartheid, Ukraine, Palestine.
Last offered: Winter 2025
| Units: 3-5
CSRE 194: Black Brazil: Afro-Brazilian Music, Literature, and Art (AFRICAAM 294, ILAC 194G)
More enslaved people from Africa were forced to Brazil than any other country and Brazil was the last country to abolish the practice of slavery in the Americas. How do these two facts impact the cultural history of Brazil? This class engages these questions to explore the origins, development, and centrality of Afro-Brazilian culture. We will explore musical genres ranging from samba to Brazilian pop (MPB) and rap, and study literary and artistic expressions from an anti-racist perspective to gain a fuller picture of Brazilian society today. Taught in English.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Klinger, D. (PI)
;
Starkey, K. (PI)
CSRE 255D: Identity in the American Imagination (AFRICAAM 255, AMSTUD 255D, FEMGEN 255M, HISTORY 255D, HISTORY 355D)
From Sally Hemings to Michelle Obama and Beyonce, this course explores the ways that racial identity has been experienced, represented, and contested throughout American history. Engaging historical, legal, and literary texts and films, this course examines major historical transformations that have shaped our understanding of racial identity. This course also draws on other imaginative modes including autobiography, memoir, photography, and music to consider the ways that racial identity has been represented in American culture.
Terms: Spr
| Units: 4-5
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-EDP
Instructors:
Hobbs, A. (PI)
CSRE 265G: Writing and Voice: Anthropological Telling through Literature and Practices of Expression (ANTHRO 265G)
In this graduate seminar we will explore how writers draw from their worlds of experience to create humanistic works of broad 'and often urgent' appeal. We will pay special attention to how creative writers integrate details of history, kinship, community, identity, pain and imagined possibilities for justice with stories that carry the potential to far exceed the bounds of a particular cultural or geographical place. Our focus will be on how writers combine the personal with larger pressing issues of our times that invite us to breakout of the cloistered spaces of academia (a responsibility, a necessity and also an opportunity) to write for larger publics. We will read and take writing prompts from authors who explore themes akin to those we care about as anthropologists to limn connections between ethnographic telling and literary sensibilities. All of the texts and writing exercises will invite students to intellectually collaborate with writers on the ways they clarify, magnify or
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In this graduate seminar we will explore how writers draw from their worlds of experience to create humanistic works of broad 'and often urgent' appeal. We will pay special attention to how creative writers integrate details of history, kinship, community, identity, pain and imagined possibilities for justice with stories that carry the potential to far exceed the bounds of a particular cultural or geographical place. Our focus will be on how writers combine the personal with larger pressing issues of our times that invite us to breakout of the cloistered spaces of academia (a responsibility, a necessity and also an opportunity) to write for larger publics. We will read and take writing prompts from authors who explore themes akin to those we care about as anthropologists to limn connections between ethnographic telling and literary sensibilities. All of the texts and writing exercises will invite students to intellectually collaborate with writers on the ways they clarify, magnify or explode understandings of power, race, colonial trauma, uncertain futures and societal afflictions as well as how individuals and communities expose and remake the constraints that the modern world has bequeathed us. We will engage works across genres. Potential authors include Lucile Clifton, Natalie Diaz, David Diop, Ralph Ellison, Laleh Khadivi, Moshin Hamid, Zora Neale Hurston, Maaza Mengiste, Toni Morrison, Tommy Orange, Zitkala-Sa and Ocean Vuong. Enrollment requires consent of instructor.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
Instructors:
Fullwiley, D. (PI)
DLCL 100: CAPITALS: How Cities Shape Cultures, States, and People (COMPLIT 100, FRENCH 175, GERMAN 175, HISTORY 106E, ILAC 175, ITALIAN 175, URBANST 153)
This course takes students on a trip to major capital cities at different moments in time, including Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, colonial Mexico City, imperial Beijing, Enlightenment and romantic Paris, existential and revolutionary St. Petersburg, roaring Berlin, modernist Vienna, and transnational Dakar. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation). No prerequisites.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3-5
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II, WAY-SI