COML 4945 - [Body Politics in African Literature and Cinema]

(crosslisted) ASRC 4995, ENGL 4995, FGSS 4945, LGBT 4945, VISST 4945
(GB) (CA-AS)

Spring. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students.

N. Diabate.

The course examines how postcolonial African writers and filmmakers engage with and revise controversial images of bodies and sexuality–genital cursing, same-sex desire, HIV/AIDS, genital surgeries, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists’ troubling of problematic tropes and practices such as the conception in 19th-century racist writings of the colonized as embodiment, the pathologization and hypersexualization of colonized bodies, and the precarious and yet empowering nature of the body and sexuality in the postcolonial African experience. As we focus on African artists and theorists, we also read American and European theorists, including but not certainly limited to Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Joseph Slaughter, detecting the ways in which discourses around bodies in the African context may shape contemporary theories and vice versa.