Instructor: Jesse McCarthy
Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 211
Enrollment: Limited to 15 students
Course Site
We begin with Steven S. Lee’s 2015 book, The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution, a study of the relation between minority writers and the Soviet Union. How can this model apply to other minority vanguardist literatures? What is or what was the avant-garde? How should we read that phrase today? Recent debates in Black Studies over temporality, periodization, affect, and antagonism, suggest that we may not have an adequate theory of the avant-garde, or at least we may need to update the ones we inherit from Renato Poggioli (1968) and Peter Bürger (1984) in their accounts of the historical formation of European vanguards. By revisiting the avant-garde, we renew a concept that touches on a wealth of topics of interest to contemporary theoretical and methodological debates: taste, politics, publics and counter-publics, signifying, archives, transnationalism, translation, incompleteness, failure, and the circulation and manipulation of new medias. There are also the classic questions: Who gets to decide what constitutes an "avant-garde" or avant-gardes? What is the relationship between avant-garde artistic movements and political or militant ones? This course will explore these themes comparatively, with readings drawn from poems, plays, novels, films, and ranging widely across the African diaspora, South and East Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. This is a graduate seminar and will typically only admit graduate students; undergraduate students may apply for special permission in writing but admittance will be strictly limited.