COML 6948 - [Pleasure and Neoliberalism]

(crosslisted) FGSS 6948, GOVT 6945, ROMS 6948

Spring. Not offered: 2021-2022. Next offered: 2023-2024. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with COML 4948/ENGL 4948/FGSS 4948/ROMS 4948.

N. Diabate.

This course examines how African writers, filmmakers, and internet media content creators engage with and revise public images of bodies—specifically pleasure, gender, queerness, genital surgeries, sex strike, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists’ commitment in highlighting forms of agency on the continent in addition to troubling longstanding and problematic colonialist tropes of pathologization of Africans. These topical explorations will be achieved through analyses of storytelling, digitality, the aestheticization of violence, and social change theories. Through contemporary films, digital platforms, novels, and essays, we will reflect on the precarious, yet empowering, nature of the body in the post-independence African experience. Public speaking (class discussions, student presentation) and deep attention to writing (reaction papers, an abstract, and annotated bibliography, and a final paper) will help you to refine your understanding of body politics.