Tanima Sharma

This interdisciplinary course examines the intersection of popular culture, art, and revolutionary praxis in the 20th and 21st centuries. Traversing theatre, film, literature, visual art, dance, and music, we will examine debates about revolutionary art¿s form and content within Left-political movements, anticolonial struggles, and movements against patriarchy, racism, and caste supremacy in contexts that include China¿s Cultural Revolution, FRELIMO songs in Mozambique, Brecht¿s epic theatre, Soviet montage techniques, and the graffiti art of the Arab Spring.

This course will explore intimacy's connotations of love, care, feelings, sex, and personal connections in a transnational context, asking how its meanings come to be constructed and what their broader social significance could be. We will pay attention to the forms, institutions and labours that enable intimacy, from the couple to the family, domestic labour to sex work, queer socialities to art and aesthetics. In doing so, we will come to see how intimacy straddles the private and public, personal and political. We will read widely, with texts from Marxist feminism, queer and critical race theory that point to the intersection of intimacy with structural inequalities such as gender, race and caste, empire, globalization and capitalism, and themes of optimism, loneliness, and yearning. There will also be literary and artistic texts to ground discussion in each class. Authors include Sylvia Federici, Lauren Berlant, Yasmin Nair, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Hazel Carby, Saidiya Hartman, and Kim Tallbear. There will be short in-class writing assignments from time to time, along with a final paper. Art and design elements are also welcome as part of the final, alongside a written component.

This course will explore intimacy's connotations of love, care, feelings, sex, and personal connections in a transnational context, asking how its meanings come to be constructed and what their broader social significance could be. We will pay attention to the forms, institutions and labours that enable intimacy, from the couple to the family, domestic labour to sex work, queer socialities to art and aesthetics. In doing so, we will come to see how intimacy straddles the private and public, personal and political. We will read widely, with texts from Marxist feminism, queer and critical race theory that point to the intersection of intimacy with structural inequalities such as gender, race and caste, empire, globalization and capitalism, and themes of optimism, loneliness, and yearning. There will also be literary and artistic texts to ground discussion in each class. Authors include Sylvia Federici, Lauren Berlant, Yasmin Nair, Kimberly Kay Hoang, Hazel Carby, Saidiya Hartman, and Kim Tallbear. There will be short in-class writing assignments from time to time, along with a final paper. Art and design elements are also welcome as part of the final, alongside a written component.