Course No: 350:660
Index #: 15068
Distribution Requirement: A4, A5, C
Thursday - 10:20 a.m.
MU 207
Thinking with and Beyond the Human in Post-1800 Literatures
Lauren Goodlad and Mukti Mangharam
How might scholars of the human and posthuman integrate their study alongside complex literary, technological, and imperial histories? How do these histories animate the present? In this course, we will explore how nineteenth and twentieth century ideas of the human mobilized instrumentalizing paradigms that course through enduring projects of empire-building, racialized capitalist markets, and technological implementations. Moreover, rather than being wholly Eurocentric formations, these discourses and practices of instrumentalization developed in and through interactive encounters in teeming urban metropoles and colonial contact zones across the globe. These syncretic and multivocal discourses of the human are complicated by the recognition that the human itself is always embedded in and structured by the non-human, posthuman, and more-than-human.
In this course, we explore this capacious post-1800 cultural archive in dialogue with a wide range of theoretical works to provide compelling research frameworks and new ways of understanding the human, posthuman, and more-than-human. We will focus especially on how a “more-than-human” approach–rooted in imperial contact zones–refigures racial capitalism, histories of technology, and humanism itself. Relevant case studies include the long and ongoing intersection between eugenics, biopolitics, and so-called artificial intelligence within histories of caste, race, and labor (including indentured labor, slavery, wage labor, and techno-orientalism).
Our theoretical works include C.L.R. James, Edward Said, Lisa Lowe, Edward Baptist, Priyamvada Gopal, Abeba Birhane, Kate Crawford, Sylvia Wynter, and Meredith Whittaker, alongside fictional and cultural texts including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, John Stuart Mill’s essays, Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Herland, Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, and Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects.