Empires in Americas Maps (Americas)

-Scapes (ContCult)

Notes on Appadurai’s “Disjuncture and Difference” cultural homogenization or cultural heterogenization? under the rubric of homogenization, a tendency to think in terms either of Americanization or “commoditization” such a view, global culture as a one-way flow impinging on the local, neglects the fact that imported culture “indigenize[s] one way or another” it also overlooks regional [...]

Oceanic Revolution/ Black Atlantic (VIAL)

Here’s a link to a longer version of the lecture I gave today: The World in Which Equiano Lived

Ha-Joon Chang v. Agent Smith

Ha-Joon Chang, the author of Bad Samaritans, has a new book out which, according to the Independent, “has likened the nation’s acceptance of free-market capitalism to that of the brainwashed characters in the film The Matrix, unwitting pawns in a fake reality.” For those of you who are interested in such things, here’s a link: [...]

Kulturkampf, Value and National Providentialism (VIAL)

On Wednesday I said that the United States is at war. Not only in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia (among other locales where the US military now engages its enemies) but in the United States itself. This war is a “cold” war, a culture war, what is called kulturkampf. In a posthumously published [...]

Key Terms from Levander and Levine/ Control Machete (Americas)

Friday we screened a clip about Walleyball (get it?) and threw a short list of key terms on the board from Levander and Levine’s essay. The film clip was intended to emphasize the arbitrary and imaginary dimensions of national borders, as well as a task which confronts us: to violate the boundaries which grid the [...]

Culture, Periodization, and the Contemporary (ContCult)

On Friday we talked about some of the defining features of the contemporary period. Remember that this periodization is subject to debate; there are potentially any number of other periodizations. For example, we could move the date forward from the early 1970s to 1989, when the USSR began to fragment, a process culminating in 1991. [...]

The Contemporary (ContCult)

On Friday we’ll begin a discussion on Raymond William’s etymological survey of the term “culture” and elaborate on the notion of “the contemporary.”

The Spatialization of History (Americas)

We’ll use these graphics for tomorrow’s class in order to understand some of the things Levander and Levine discuss in their introductory essay. Geographical space, at least in terms of its mapping, is an invention. The Americas, in this sense, were invented by those who “discovered” it. Yet there are other geographical imaginings of the [...]

Providentialism (VIAL)

Here’s a clip we’ll be screening on Friday, a conversation between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell which attributes the September 11, 2001 attacks to the moral failures of Americans. It’s important to note that this sort of interpretation has a long history, notably in the literary genre of the Jeremiad, a warning against “backsliding” which [...]