Gender, Ethnicity, Class: Literary and Cultural Representation in English

Summary

What Do We Study

We will study different critical perspectives of literary and cultural analysis which deal with the intersection of identities and cultures in the English speaking world and we will analyze a selection of short-stories, essays and novels, which address and problematize the concept of gender, class and ethnicity. We will examine how these texts map the interconnections between artistic expression, social critique, and political intervention, particularly focusing on the questioning of normative identities and its repercussions. The course is divided into four thematic blocks:

• BLOCK 1: Theoretical perspectives and key concepts Theoretical perspectives and key concepts: Identity, Subject, Power. Gender, Class, Sexuality and Ethinicty .
• BLOCK 2: Gender Trouble. Deconstructing globalised gender identities. Bodies in movement. Dystopian futures. New corporeal cartographies.
• BLOCK 3: New Class struggle. New class war against the working class. Intersections in the margins.
• BL.OCK 4: Postcolonial questions for global times. Molecularising the nation: transnationalism. Diaspora literatures. Postcolonial Hybridity.

Which is the Line of Thought

Texts will be discussed and analysed from a multidisciplinary approach within Cultural Studies and from the critical and theoretical perspective of Intersectionality, Posthumanist Feminisms, Postcolonial Studies and Poststructuralist theories.

Theoretical and Practical Approaches

• Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.
• Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. 2006.
• Achebe, Chinua. Home and exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Durham University Press, 2010.
• --------------. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. London: Verso, 2014.
• Bauman, Zygmunt. Collateral Damage. Social Inequalities in a Global Age. London: Polity, 2011.
• --------------. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
• Bhabha, Homi K. “Culture’s In-Between” in Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (eds.) Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1996.
• Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist
• Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• --------------. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.
• --------------. “Thinking as a Nomadic Subject”, Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin. Guest Lecture.
• October 7, 2014.
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990.
• --------------. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York:
• Verso, 2004.
• --------------.  “Gender is burning: Questions of appropriation and subversion”. Cultural Politics 11
• (1997): 381-395.
• Davis, Angela. Women, Race & Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Paul Patton. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum, 2001.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
• Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. The Souls of Black Folk; Essays and Sketches. Chicago, A. G. McClurg, 1903. New York :Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968.
• Dimovitz, Scott A. “Cartesian Nuts: Rewriting the Platonic Androgyne in Angela Carter’s JapaneseSurrealism”. Femspec 6.2 (2005): 15-31.
• Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1952 [1967].
• Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000.
• Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
• --------------. “Afterword: The Subject and Power”, in Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P. (eds.). Michel Foucault: Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1982.
• --------------.  Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 2012.
• Gupta, Suman. Globalization and Literature. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.
• Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.
• Hall, Stuart. “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?”, in Hall S., Du Gay P.(ed.), Questions Of Cultural Identity. London: Sage Publications, 1996.
• Hall, Stuart, and Paul Du Gay. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1996.
• Hall, Stuart, David Morley, and Kuan-Hsing Chen. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1996.
• hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984.
• --------------.  “Is Paris Burning?” Z Magazine 4.6 (1991): 60-64.
• Hopper, Paul. Understanding Cultural Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
• Hutcheon, Linda and Mario Valdés (eds.). Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
• Jameson, Fredric and Masao Miyoshi (eds.). The Cultures of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
• Martín-Lucas, Belén and Andrea Ruthven (eds.). Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures: Reading Transnational Cultural Commodities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
• Morrison, Toni. Playing In the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York :Vintage Books, 1993.
• McLeod, John. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. New York: Routledge,
• 2004.
• Ngugi wa' Thiongo. Decolonizing the Mind. The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986.
• Nicol, Bran. The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction. Leiden: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Pidduck, Julianne. “Travels with Sally Potter’s Orlando: Gender, Narrative, Movement”. Screen, 38 (1997): 172-189.
• Preciado, Paul B. Countersexual Manifesto. New York : Columbia University Press, 2018.
• Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta in Association with Penguin, 1992.
• Russo, Ann, Lourdes Torres, Chandra Mohanty. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
• Spivak, Gayatri, The Post-Colonial Critic, ed. Sarah Harasym, London: Routledge, 1990.
• Torras i Francès, Mari. Encarna(c)ciones. Teoría(s) de los cuerpos (Cuerpos que cuentan). Barcelona: UOC Editorial, 2008.
• Weedon, Chris. Identity and Culture. Narratives of Difference and Belonging. New York: Open University Press, 2004.

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