COML 4945

COML 4945

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2019-2020.

The course examines how postcolonial African writers and filmmakers engage with and revise controversial images of bodies and sexuality--genital cursing, same-sex desire, HIV/AIDS, genital surgeries, etc. Our inquiry also surveys African theorists' troubling of problematic tropes and practices such as the conception in 19th-century racist writings of the colonized as embodiment, the pathologization and hypersexualization of colonized bodies, and the precarious and yet empowering nature of the body and sexuality in the postcolonial African experience. As we focus on African artists and theorists, we also read American and European theorists, including but not certainly limited to Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and Joseph Slaughter, detecting the ways in which discourses around bodies in the African context may shape contemporary theories and vice versa.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: 15 students.

Breadth Requirement (GB)
Distribution Category (CA-AS)

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Syllabi:
  • 18010 COML 4945   SEM 101

    • TR Uris Hall 438
    • Jan 21 - May 5, 2020
    • Diabate, N

  • Instruction Mode: Hybrid - Online & In Person
    Enrollment limited to: 15 students.