HGS 368 - Special Topics in Genocide

May be repeated for credit

SPRING 2024- SECTION 01- Horror, Monstrosity, and Western Cultural Anxieties

More than any other genre, horror is the most revealing in its ability to project a diagnosis of collective anxiety. The monstrous figure, while culturally specific, is a universal reflection and expression of fear, repulsion, fury, and even desire. This seminar engages manifestations of political and social life and how they are turned into various forms of monstrosity. Engaging cinematic and literary monsters alongside social conditions that exploit humanity (fascism, slavery, and minstrelsy) or pervert its “ideal state” (disability, relative ugliness, gender non-conformity), we will explore the genealogy of monstrosity not simply as an abnormality, but as a revelation. This course aspires to excavate the many registers of monstrosity in search of what makes it such a popular and recurring site of meaning-making.

SPRING 2024- SECTION 2- Anti-Black Violence and Sociologies of the Body (Politic)

Beyond the systematized categories of “race” that emerged out of colonial encounters, anti-blackness, specifically, has been a nuclear means of organizing Euroamerican sociality and political economy since the exclusive enslavement of Africans in the 15th century. Through the tethering of race to forced labor, capital, and property, blackness has come to be a nuclear means of defining dominant cultural and biosocial conventions. Anti-blackness, thus, has critically inflected the very notion of modernity itself. In consideration of treatments of black people themselves and constructions of blackness, this seminar considers the hegemonic western definitions and reinforcements of morality, healthfulness/illness and disability, gender and beauty, entertainment, animality, criminality, and more as they all pertain to ideas of citizenship and belonging.

FALL 2023- SECTION 01- SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WAR AND GENOCIDE

The course analyses sexual violence in wars and genocides around the globe and throughout modern history. Examples include the genocides of Native Americans, Armenians, and Jews; those in Namibia, Rwanda¸ Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, and Darfur; wars and armed conflicts in different times and areas, including Russia’s current war in Ukraine. It explores various forms of sexual violence, such as rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy or abortion, forced marriage, forced prostitution, forced sterilization, genital mutilation, castration, penectomy, and forced nudity. Special attention is dedicated to the analysis of the causes of sexual violence. It analyses how genocidal language, hate speech, antisemitism, racism, imperialism, and concepts of masculinity facilitate sexual violence in armed conflicts.  The course also examines the short- and long-term traumatic physical, psychological, and mental effects of sexual violence on victims and survivors; methods of dealing with the consequences of sexual violence in terms of medical, psychological, social, financial, and legal help for survivors and their communities. Finally, the course zeroes in on challenges in prosecuting sexual violence in conflicts and genocides and explains why so many perpetrators went unpunished and enjoyed impunity. 

FALL 2023- SECTION 02- ”LOOKING AT VIOLENCE”

“What does it mean to develop an ethic of seeing genocide and mass violence?

Informally following a trajectory of camera technologies, this seminar will explore the political function of the atrocity image - whether of the brutalities of a battleground or genocide killing field, or the classical humanitarian image of starving children or filled to the brim refugee camps. Through critical readings and close image studies, will attend to the episteme of the atrocity image, taking seriously contextual attempts to mobilize empathy and philanthropic action, or, conversely, normalize and justify violence. From the first humanitarian campaign in the Belgian Congo to 20th century lynching photography and genocides, the still-ongoing Global War on Terror to widely circulated images of Black people brutalized by the police, students will engage images as well as familiar competing arguments about visual regimes that yield these empathy-producing texts or whether the proliferation of these images actually reifies the distance between oneself and the racial, cultural, social, and civilizational ‘Other.’ We will interrogate the ontology of the regime of photography, critically engaging the implications of the camera’s ‘capture’ and enclosure of political and civil imaginaries through the image’s staging and destruction of worlds and the peoples within them.”

Anticipated Terms Offered: Varies