TEACHING

TEACHING AT CWRU

REFUGEE VOICES

Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025, Fall 2025

According to the United Nations, more than 100 million people are currently displaced worldwide due to conflict, persecution, and human rights violations. Many others continue to be forcefully displaced due to environmental catastrophes, gender-based violence, and economic precarity. With the intensification of global migrations, borders have become the territories upon which competing claims to vulnerability play out: the vulnerability of asylum seekers subjected to detention, deportation, and death is justified in the name of national security and the vulnerability of the nation. In this context, we have seen a considerable rise in xenophobic political and media narratives around the world that depict refugees in a negative light or that privilege certain displaced groups over others. At the same time, dominant humanitarian narratives tend to rely on selective and incomplete depictions of refugee vulnerability removed from broader transnational social, economic, and historical conditions. Refugees are, then, often represented as threats or voiceless victims.

This course investigates how refugee voices are framed, translated, and transmitted by looking at how different institutions, political actors, media, or writers represent refugee vulnerability. We will raise a number of important questions throughout the course: Who represents refugees? Which voices are uplifted and which voices are erased? How do notions of vulnerability, gratitude, and resilience play out in prevalent representations of refugees? What obstacles do writers encounter when they write on behalf of refugees? And how do writers of refugee-background represent their own displacement and migration journeys?

The course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of forced displacement and the movement across borders, by contextualizing migration within legal, humanitarian, literary, journalistic, and political histories. We will explore the ways in which refugees have been depicted in literature, media, art, and other forms of representation, as well as the ways in which refugees have represented themselves in memoirs or personal essays. A considerable part of the course will be dedicated to evaluating multiple narrative voices through our close analyses of literary texts, essays, and memoirs by Valeria Luiselli, Dina Nayeri, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Mohsin Hamid and others. 

THE ART OF THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

Fall 2023 and Spring 2024

Graphic memoirs are a unique genre of autobiographical comics exploring questions related to identity, history, and politics through the mediums of experimental art and literary storytelling. In this course, we will read three powerful graphic memoirs—Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, and Nora Krug’s Belonging—which detail diverse migration journeys, as well as the historical upheavals, cultural tensions, and family connections that shape the protagonists’ memory and sense of self. Through our class discussions and writing assignments, we will delve deeper into the art of the graphic memoir and analyze the ways in which authors represent their illustrated selves and their family relationships, engage with key historical events, rewrite dominant political narratives, and convey complex affective memories through visuals and textuality. We will take inspiration from these graphic memoirs in order to delve deeper into our personal and family histories and find creative ways to tell our own stories. Throughout the class, students will identify a key moment in their own past or in their family history and research it at length so as to produce their own autobiographical comic strips, collages or visual narratives as part of their final projects. The research process may include consulting old diaries, browsing through family photograph albums, interviewing family members or friends, and placing the story in its historical, cultural, and political context through an analysis of its broader implications. Students will first draft a personal narrative paper, then put together a script for their creative project, and assemble their comic strips or experimental artworks. No previous arts experience is required for this class. Besides our explorations of key graphic memoirs, we will hold multiple in-class workshops on storytelling, visual techniques, and arts practices in which students will be able to develop their own creative approaches for their final projects.

BORDERSCAPES

Spring 2023

It is a fact of our contemporary world that borders allow for the free flow of capital and goods, while they block and restrict the movement of human beings. Border walls, fences, and barriers have widely expanded worldwide due to the intensification of cross-border migrations, the rise of security infrastructures, and the management of migrant labor. While borders may have been naturalized through territorial demarcations, they have always been socially-constructed boundaries developed by nation states to enforce and maintain imagined distinctions between insiders and outsiders, often reproducing racial and ethnic hierarchies.

Borderscapes refer to border landscapes where cultural, political, economic and social practices continue reshaping the territories and power relations separating peoples. These landscapes bring together border security technologies, policing practices, natural habitats, murals and graffiti, and community protests resisting division. Borderscapes are often sites of perilous and deadly crossings with thousands of people losing their lives every year on migratory routes worldwide. Yet, borderscapes can also be sites of cross-cultural hybridity, intertwined identities, and resistance.

In this course we will closely examine several borderscapes such as the U.S.-Mexico border, the Israeli West Bank barrier, the Melilla border fence, the natural border formed by the Mediterranean, and others through an engagement with an interdisciplinary set of sources including scholarly texts, nonfiction, media and the arts. We will also engage with the relationship between the rise of the nation state, colonial expansion, and the creation of borders; security regimes and border militarization in the post-9/11 era; the detention, deportation and human rights abuses of forced migrants crossing borders; and the externalization of borders worldwide maintaining the separation between wealthy and poor communities.

TEACHING AT UCSB

INTRODUCTION TO COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Spring 2019

This course introduces students to the theory and practice of Comparative Literature through an engagement with the tasks of the discipline, key examples of literary and visual texts, and reflections on literary theory and methodology. We will engage with questions of literary genre, style, close reading, and periodization, while also pursuing a broader understanding of literary texts their historical, political and social contexts. Through an exploration of world literature, globalization, coloniality and postcolonialism, and the translation and reception of texts, we will develop literary analysis tools and reading skills to help us parse through a diverse selection of cultural objects. We will read one of the earliest surviving works of world literature, the ancient Mesopotamian poem The Epic of Gilgamesh and discuss the intertwining of different world mythological traditions. We will engage with postcolonial theories of literature through Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s reflections on colonial alienation. We will consider the collection of Arabic folk tales One Thousand and One Nights as a seminal text of world literature and translation studies and we will pursue the afterlives of its protagonist, Scheherazade, in texts by Fatima Mernissi and Mohja Kahf. Finally, we will look at the iconic image of Frankenstein from the Romantic text by Mary Shelley to contemporary Iraqi gothic fiction by Ahmed Saadawi.

LITERARY AND CRITICAL THEORY: THE GAZE

Winter 2019

What does it mean to look at an object, at an artwork, or at another person? Is the act of looking spontaneous, neutral and natural or is it informed by our memory, our previous experiences, by social conventions we have internalized, and by common sense? Is it proper to speak about the gaze as an individual experience or is the gaze a relational and collective structure composed of socialized ways of seeing in which we participate as seers? Is the image we construct of ourselves interdependent with the social gaze and the gaze of others? And can the gaze do harm to human and nonhuman others, especially when it controls, disciplines or misrepresents them?

This course explores the history of literary and critical theory with a particular emphasis on “the gaze” as a symbolic structure constituted by rehearsed acts of looking, historical assumptions, social practices and norms, and forms of power. We will engage with several schools of theory, including Visual Culture, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminist Theory, Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism, and others, in order to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of the function of the gaze as a social, cultural and political force. For this purpose, we will apply theories about the gaze to a diverse selection of literary texts by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Simone de Beauvoir, Jamaica Kincaid, ETA Hoffman, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, and Mohja Kahf, as well as to several films, including Jane B., par Agnès V., Illusions, and The Celluloid Closet.Students will develop a basic understanding of several theoretical traditions and will learn how to deploy theoretical concepts in order to read, analyze and critically engage with literary texts and other cultural objects.

GLOBAL HUMANITIES AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Fall 2018

How can conversations in the humanities help us reframe and reconsider human rights discourses? Can literature, film, the arts, media, and philosophy serve as forces towards social justice? And how should we incorporate storytelling, testimony and narratives of witnessing in our contemporary debates regarding human rights abuses and violations?

This course offers an investigation of different definitions of human rights in various historical, political and global contexts from the point of view of narrative, language and representation. Through our close-readings of narratives that bear witness to instances of systemic violence such as colonial occupation, racism, imperialism, sexual violence, torture, illegal detention, and economic oppression, we will inquire into the potentials and limitations of human rights language and devise theoretical and political frameworks towards an ethics of responsibility. While acknowledging the importance of human rights language for different social and political movements towards social justice, we will also investigate the ways in which human rights discourse can be co-opted by empire or global capital. We will rely on the insights of scholars, writers and filmmakers in order to develop a comparative critique of global power and systemic inequity.

POSTCOLONIAL AFRICAN WOMEN'S WRITING

Summer 2017

This course is an introduction to contemporary postcolonial African literatures with a special focus on a number of key African female authors. Reading some of the most representative African texts of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century will give us the opportunity to engage different African socio-political, cultural and historical contexts in depth and open the space for literary comparison. This course emphasizes the heterogeneity and complexity of African communities by paying special attention to the issues which have shaped colonial and postcolonial contexts including the particularities of different movements of decolonization and national liberation, the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and class in the production of oppression, the relationship between (post-)colonial alienation, belonging and hybrid subjectivities, and experiences of migration in an increasingly globalized world of porous borders. We will be reading texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria), Zoë Wicomb (South Africa), Assia Djebar (Algeria), Nawal El Saadawi (Egypt), Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe), Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria) and Laila Lalami (Morocco), as well as a number of theoretical texts by postcolonial critics such as Frantz Fanon, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’O. To compliment our reading of literature, we’ll be watching films such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Ingrid Sinclair’s Flame(1996) and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966).

COMPARATIVE EXISTENTIALISM

Winter 2017

This course will investigate the manner in which world literature has addressed some of the most important existential questions related to what it means to be human, subjectivity, social alienation, pain and survival, by exploring different literary forms including novels, novellas and plays, in addition to autobiographical non-fiction, philosophical references and essays. As part of our understanding of the extent of the discipline of comparative literature, we will address the manner in which different literary traditions are constituted by particular intellectual and philosophical debates, forms of transnational cultural exchange, as well as by histories of violence and discrimination. 

We will evaluate and compare different examples of literary texts from various literary traditions, including from Russia, France, Ireland, Algeria, Palestine, Zimbabwe and the United States, and we will ask what constitutes a genre, a style and a literary thematic. Literary authors include Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Kamel Daoud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Assia Djebar, Ghassan Kanafani, Ralph Ellison and Tsitsi Dangarembga.

A large section of the course will be dedicated to the manner in which postcolonial literature rewrites Western literary traditions in order to address the complexity of power relations, and the psychological and existential effects of colonial relations. Considering the notion of world literature will enable us to ask questions about the mediation and interconnectedness of literary traditions, as well as the manner in which certain philosophical perspectives (in our case, existentialism) travel across different geographies giving birth to diverse literary expressions and worldviews. Last but not least, we will ask whether literature can convey something of the lived experience of differently-constituted human subjects and point us to the various social and political contexts in which identities come into being. 

WAR, IMPERIALISM, TRAUMA

Summer 2016

 

This course will investigate the historical context, global complexities, and collective impact of some of the most catastrophic wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, aiming to develop a discourse addressing imperial and colonial dimensions of power, as well as modes of recording history, remembering and representing trauma. We will especially inquire into the social, historical and affective impact of such major traumatic events as those of World War II and the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Nakba, the French colonial legacy and the Algerian war of independence, and 9/11 and the “war on terror.” We will be studying a number of historical and critical texts, as well as personal testimonies, literary texts and films preoccupied with making sense of and giving shape to traumatic collective events. 

Central questions we will address include: How does suffering become internalized collectively and remembered in the making of testimonies and histories? What is the relationship between trauma and narrative? How can the inconceivable and the unimaginable traumatic event be represented and put into speech acts / imagery? What do the politics of witnessing imply? What are the ethics of remembering and building sympathy with others’ suffering? How does the historical experience of trauma become complicated by imperialist discourses and dynamics of power? And what do such notions as community, nation and cultural identity mean in the contexts of ongoing political and military conflicts?

FRANZ KAFKA

Summer 2015

Franz Kafka's unique and mesmerizing writings have marked generations of artists, writers and philosophers and have stirred an abundance of critical interpretations. In this course, we will close read a selection of Kafka’s novels, short stories and autobiographical writings in an attempt to trace the radical potentials of his aesthetic view of the world. While developing our own understandings of the ever ubiquitous term, the Kafkaesque, we will focus on the way in which Kafka carefully constructs his imaginary environments through an unusual amalgamation of bizarre imagery, a bitter sense of humor, existential angst, ambiguity, the absurd, a stifling sense of bureaucratic order, the challenging of authority figures, the privileging of the illogical, the irrational, the incomprehensible and the perspective of the nonhuman animal. We will also interrogate the fascination with Kafka's aesthetics by approaching a series of other media inspired by his manifold imaginary such as films by Orson Welles, Piotr Dumala, Michael Haneke, Philip Glass's opera In The Penal Colony, Max Richter's music album The Blue Notebooks, and Robert Crumb's graphic novel Kafka. Finally, we will engage with a series of theoretical texts by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and others.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

MY STORY: A COMIC STRIP WORKSHOP SERIES

Karibu CLE, The Refugee Response, July 13-15, 202.

This series of comic strip workshops was designed for students of refugee-background enrolled in Karibu CLE, a soccer & arts therapy summer camp put together by The Refugee Response and Corner65 on the premises of the Thomas Jefferson International Newcomer's Academy.

In these workshops, we explored different culturally relevant graphic memoirs, discussed and tested the various art supplies and tools we can use to create our own comics, and explored different ways to tell our own migration stories, family stories, and personal stories as a means to process our experiences in creative and sustaining ways.

IMMIGRATION 101

InterReligious Task Force on Central America and Colombia, October–November, 2020.

DISPLACEMENT: THE LITERATURE OF FORCED MIGRATION 

Literary Cleveland, April–June, 2020.

In this reading series, we explored works by three key contemporary authors—NoViolet Bulawayo, Mohsin Hamid, and Valeria Luiselli—about forced migration and engaged with diverse representations of refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants. According to the United Nations, more than seventy million people are currently displaced worldwide due to war, persecution, and conflict. At the same time, we have witnessed the global rise of nationalist and xenophobic discourses that dehumanize and reject displaced populations. In the United States, we have seen dramatic changes in our policies affecting refugees and asylum-seekers in the past few years, with the rollback of asylum protections and the considerable lowering of the number of refugees to be admitted for resettlement. Contemporary literary authors have challenged these systems of exclusion by providing more complex depictions of forced migration journeys. 

POETRY AND THE SHAPE OF EXPERIENCE

April 26, 2020

This online poetry workshop was organized for Cleveland Clinic residents as a means of exploring creative outlets for self-expression throughout the many challenges and situations of enhanced stress and loss introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

We focused primarily on using the language of poetry to convey moments of vulnerability we witnessed or experienced ourselves. Vulnerability is an abstract and ambiguous term which may carry different meanings for different people. Reflecting on our shared vulnerability (in the face of disease, climate catastrophes, wars and so on) is certainly a timely topic. Some of the questions we grappled with: Are we all vulnerable in the same ways? Are some of us more vulnerable than others? And can vulnerability be both a unifying and a divisive force?