The Certificate programs in American Studies, Film and Media Cultures, and Global Early Modern Studies will be offering the following courses this fall. They invite you to register if interested. You do not have to be pursuing a Certificate in order to register.

 

FSCP 81000/ Archeology of Media: Film, Fashion, Montage, [3 credits], Wednesdays, 4:15pm – 6:15pm, Room 3207. In-person. Cross-listed with IDS 81680, MALS 71300 and WSCP 81000.

Instructor: Eugenia Paulicelli

This course fulfills one of the two elective courses required for the Film and Media Cultures Certificate.

This graduate seminar-plus-workshops parallels an eponymous course at Parsons, The New School for Design.

Behind this course is the digital turn and ongoing experimentation that has triggered and inspired an archival excavation of films, newsreels, industry and utility films, advertising etc. In its examination of the fashion and film industries, the course brings together theory and practice, history and historiography. The course will explore and excavate the hybrid genre of fashion film, a phenomenon of the tail end of the twentieth century, and a multifaceted entity that escapes rigid definition. The course will critically examine the conceptual broadening of perspectives on fashion film by connecting the rapidly changing field of today’s digital fashion communications with a hidden history of fashion film, newsreels, and utility films at the time of its first emergence. We will look at and compare material of the twentieth century and the twenty-first century following a method that juxtaposes the past and the present in order to actively challenge our conceptualizations of both (Catherine Russell/parallax historiography). The course will draw extensively on seminal work on the archeology of media by Thomas Elsasser as well as on the latest scholarship on film and media by scholars such as Reese-Roberts, Parrika, Evans, Uhlirova and others.

The course concept and syllabus are conceived together; shared classes with all students and group projects are combined with sessions that are discrete to the respective cohort and feature individual work on texts, sounds and images. In our courses, material processes of repairing, remaking and reusing are combined with original techniques of editing and montage, to learn about shared principles in diverse fields of creative practice. We study these processes through media archaeology that analyses digital culture and memory, unearthing layers of past and present media that represent cultural movements and fashions. Histories of montage show how divergent elements are brought together in new and unexpected combinations, with distinct rhythms and types of sequencing that unite many creative techniques: from editing film and sampling sounds, via collaging images and assembling materials, to fusing fabrics and patchworking textiles. A principal medium for our archaeology is the fashion film and its material culture. It is a medium where making and meaning come together through historical patterns and their contemporary revivals. The cutting of such patterns is a shared technique for garments and moving images. Our expanded understanding of the fashion film traces the original montage of material and its representation in moving images, from films of the silent era to today’s digital motion capture. Practical studio work with editing processes prepares our analyses of mediatic techniques across time and space.

Students can choose to write a traditional paper or making a short film.

 

FSCP 81000/ Women Making Film in North Africa: Before and After the Arab Spring, [3 credits], Thursdays, 4:15 pm – 7:15 pm. Room TBA. In-person. Cross-listed with WSCP 81000, AFCP 72000, MES 76900 and FREN 70700.

Instructor: Nicole Wallenbrock

 

The optimism and hope which accompanied the revolutions of 2011-2014 in the Middle East and North Africa (commonly known as the Arab Spring) dissipated as militaristic regimes dominated. Even Tunisia, initially the greatest democratic hope, has taken an authoritarian turn. Now some have summarized the results as the Arab Winter. Nevertheless, since the Arab Spring and the subsequent conservative movements, we find a growth of women making films in the Maghreb—Kaouther Ben Hania of Tunisia has been nominated twice for an Academy Award and won best documentary at Cannes for The Four Daughters (2022), and Maryem Touzani of Morocco with The Blue Caftan (2022) and Adam (2019) has also reached international acclaim.

This course will investigate the screen images that women from North Africa have produced in a half-century emphasizing the last two decades in which the number of works by women from the Maghreb have proliferated because of digitization, an increase in film festivals that showcase and finance their work, and new funding from the Gulf region. We will study filmmakers from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia countries which each had a colonial relationship with France; Algeria was briefly a French colony (1830-1848) before becoming part of France (1848-1962), Morocco (1912-1956) and Tunisia (1881-1956) were French protectorates. This colonial past laid the foundation of a tenuous film relationship with Europe—as such films from the Maghreb represent an exchange of ideas, languages, and moneys.

Our course moves in chronological order beginning with Fatma 75 (Salma Baccar, 1978) and The Noubah of the Women of Mount Chenoua (Assia Djebar 1979) films that declare what was hidden, women fighting for decolonization. These screenings will prepare for our focus on recent films, we will study As I open my eyes (Leyla Bouzid, 2015), Papicha (Mounia Meddour, 2019) and the aforementioned films of Touzani and Ben Hania, works which portray contemporary history by underlining women’s situation and perspective.

We will screen the majority of films in class. The course will also include theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Fatema Mernissi as well as articles by film scholars. Students will write some short response papers to films and readings under discussion and in this way build a portfolio, all of which will guide them to a final project.

 

This course fulfills one of the two elective courses required for the certificate.

 

 

FSCP 81000/ Islam, Media, and Politics in the Middle East, [3 credits], Mondays, 6:30pm – 8:30pm. Room TBA. In-person.  Cross-listed with MES 74900.

Instructor: Bilge Yesil

 

This course examines the nexus of politics, culture, and religion in the Middle East through the lens of media and communication. It focuses on how media and communication shape (and are shaped by) national and regional politics, ethnic and religious identities, and global cultural flows. Taking into consideration the heterogeneous nature of the region, the course pays special attention to articulations of media and culture with national, ethnic, class, gender, and sectarian identities.

We begin the semester with a discussion of how the “West” sees the Middle East and explore the linkages between colonialism, Orientalism, and media representations of Arabs and Muslims. We then proceed to analyze how Muslim media makers in “the West” and in the Middle East mediate faith, belonging, and community. Next, we investigate the intersection of politics and religion in/through Middle East-based television dramas, hip hop music, video games, reality TV, and journalism. Finally, we turn our attention to the role of foreign aid, geopolitics, and diaspora to shed light on how Middle East media travel beyond the geographical borders of the region.

 

This course fulfills one of the two elective courses required for the certificate.

 

 

ASCP 81500: Trans/Racial, [3 credits], Tuesdays, 2:00pm – 4:00pm. Room 3310A. In-person. Cross-listed with THEA 80300.

Instructor: Miles Grier

 

The term transracial was originally invoked by the nonwhite children of white adoptive parents, whose domestic situation stems from the material disparities of race on both local and global scales. These adoptees often testify to a lack of identity, while their notorious successors, such as Rachel Dolezal and Oli London, have become scandalous effigies—charged with executing an identity theft to crown European empires’ ongoing expropriation of land and labor. Both those claiming a transracial identity and those decrying such assertions have invoked transgender as a comparable category. Yet, despite the impulse to yoke racial crossing with fraud, the term transracial opens onto a social problem not easily resolved by intoning “to thine own self be true.” It might well be impossible to be true to durable but incoherent social categories that owe their tenacity to their openness to rearticulation.

Clearly, confronting the transracial problematic requires a capacious historical and geographical scope combined with fine-tuned analysis of languages, performances, and rituals of social reclassification. Consequently, in this course, we will investigate cases that range from the slave cultures of ancient Greece and Rome to the playhouses of early modern Europe, from indigenous adoption ceremonies of colonial Americas to present-day media scandals.

If theories of gender performativity suggest that performances of gender always fail to approximate the ideals they cite, should we understand this failure to be a site of possibility or of further containment? Can we locate origins of gender and racial performativity, the citationality through which these social categories endure and change across time? Is the relationship of these categories causal, parallel, or mutually reinforcing? And what of the place of voluntary theatricality, strenuously denied in Judith Butler’s account? Do trans and race theories restore agency to Butler’s arguably constrained subject?

We will likely cover such scholars as Judith Butler, Joseph Roach, Page DuBois, Colby Gordon, Hamit Arvas, Urvashi Chakravarty, Mark Rifkin, Audra Simpson, Greta LaFleur, Hortense Spillers, Omise’eke N. Tinsley, Joseph Pierce, and Eric Lott.

Students will be responsible for two presentations: one on a scholarly text and one on a performance, either theatrical or quotidian. Finally, students will produce a seminar paper of approximately fifteen pages.

 

ASCP 81500: Tennessee Williams in Context, [3 credits], Thursdays, 4:15pm – 6:15pm. Room 3310A. In-person. Cross-listed with THEA 86100.

 

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) began producing plays during the Great Depression, achieved the height of popular and critical success in the postwar climate of the 1940s and ’50s, and, despite repeated assaults from a biased critical establishment and a sharp decline in the popularity of his later plays, continued to write and respond to social changes throughout the 1960s, `70s, and `80s. In plays as varied as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), The Rose Tattoo (1950), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Green Eyes (1970), for example, Williams merges the personal with the political, as he interrogates how the values surrounding southern whiteness and its institutions permeate the nuances of human relationships in terms of racial and cultural difference. During the last 20 years, the international reevaluation of Williams’s career, which includes his post-1960s grotesque plays that deal overtly with queer themes, has led to successful world premieres and more informed productions, providing a more complete picture of the relevance of Williams’s entire oeuvre.

This course explores Williams’s plays in the context of changing social, cultural, and political developments in the United States (with some reference to European and British cross-cultural influences) from the 1930s to the 1980s, and examines his relationship to the work of other playwrights in each period, such as Eugene O’Neill, Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, Robert Anderson, William Inge, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, Sam Shepard, Sarah Kane, and Charles Ludlam. Assignments will include two essays and an oral presentation. Essay #1 (7-10 pages) will be worth 30 percent; Essay #2 (10-15 pages) will be worth 40 percent; and the in-class presentation of 20-30 minutes will be worth 30 percent.

 

FREN 86500/GEMS 83100: Reading Montaigne. 2 or 4 Credits. Prof. Erec Koch (French). Tuesday, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m., In person.

Montaigne’s Essais are the point of origin for numerous now-familiar literary genres, forms, and structures: that text itself inaugurates a new genre; it is the first example of personal writing in French and problematized representation of the self; it situates itself at the crossroads of orality and writing; it elaborates aspects of style and structure that begin to define literary textuality; it is the first text to explore non-closural writing. A recursive point of reference for literary writing up to the present day, Montaigne’s text opens to problems of literary theory as well as to problems of historical literary succession and derivation. In this course, we will read all of Montaigne’s Essais with an eye to those problems in literary history and theory. What does it mean for a text to be modeled on conversation and orality? What does it mean for personal writing to represent the self and at the same time problematize self-representation? What is the status of a text that invites consideration of the mutual imbrication of reading and writing; that cites and invites citation; that opens to derivative further writing? We will read critical works side by side with the Essais, works that and will include literary historical scholarship (Desan, Friedrich, Lestringant, Pouilloux and Villey, among others) as well as theoretically informed studies (Compagnon, Chenoweth, Cave, Conley, Defaux, Derrida and Mehlman). Discussion in English (and French). Course requirements: discussion and in-class presentations required for 2 credits; discussion, in-class presentations, and research paper required for 3 and 4 credits.

 

GEMS 72100/MALS 74600: Introduction to Global Early Modern Studies: Cultures of Exchange in the Early Modern World, 3 credits. Prof. Francesca Bregoli (History). Wednesdays, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m., In person

The early modern period was characterized by increased exchanges and mobility, which led to great political, cultural, and material changes. The European discovery and exploitation of American and Asian lands and resources, the resulting circulation of new commodities and knowledge, and the growth of colonial empires accompanied smaller-scale movements facilitated by improved infrastructures and communication systems. This course explores the cultures of exchange, the encounters, and the conflicts that resulted from voluntary and forced early modern travels and migrations, global trade, and imperial ambitions, and their repercussions from the late 15th to the end of the 18th century. How was movement experienced and practiced? How did networks of trade impact and inform cross-cultural relations? How did new encounters shape the production of knowledge? We will approach these questions from the perspective and with the tools of cultural and social history. To explore the early modern circulation of people, objects, and ideas, we will investigate trans-regional merchant diasporas; cross-cultural communication; piracy and captivity; brokerage and diplomacy; the rise of consumer culture; new scientific exchanges, and more. The course will include readings on early modern Europe and the Mediterranean region, the Ottoman Levant, North Africa, Asia, and the colonial world.

See syllabus here

(Click under Fall 2024)

 

 

For any registration issues, please contact rjalil@gc.cuny.edu