COML 6351 - Antagonism

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students. Co-meets with COML 4351/ENGL 4991.

P. Vaziri.

In contemporary scholarship on race, temporality mediates the relationship between historicity and human difference by way of alignments and affiliations between time and interiority; immediacy and transparency; and complementarily, exteriority and opacity. In contrast to its popular denotations, race scholarship thus recognizes “mediation” as antagonistic, rather than conciliatory. We map the discursive lines shaping contemporary scholarship which grasps for the philosophical grounds of race and racialization at the infrastructural levels of time, space, and ontology. In tandem, we consider media that reflect and engage questions raised by the antagonistic mediation of racial difference. Readings may include works by Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, David Marriott, Fred Moten, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, David Llloyd, Michelle Wright, Calvin Warren, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida.