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Consumer Culture and Globalization

This course has 4 units of work: (1) introduction to culture and globalization, (2) Fashionomics (production and consumption of apparel-e.g. supply chains & sweat shops, malls & bazaars, advertising); (3) Food Justice (systems of production, sites of consumption-e.g. African farms, UK supermarkets, upscale restaurants, star chefs), and (4) Imagineered Spaces (e.g., Disney World and Orlando, Dubai mall and surrounds). The course is comparative, using material on the US, UK, Africa, India, China, and more.

"Sensational Fiction at the Fin de Siècle" From 1886 to the end of the century, a series of characters burst onto the literary scene and soon gained iconic status at home and abroad - Jekyll and Hyde, Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray, Salomé, Kurtz, and Dracula. This course examines these eccentric figures and the fictional works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, and Bram Stoker in which they first appear to better understand this transformative period in literary and cultural history. What material conditions, technological innovations, and cultural changes fueled this unprecedented eruption of unconventional figures? What role did science play as its secular disposition pressed against religious orthodoxies, whether in its methodology or in the new knowledge being produced around questions of degeneration, urbanization, and madness? And to what can we attribute the longevity of these figures? We shall consider the cultural moment of each and the impact of this subgenre on readers and audiences near and far as these characters continue to haunt the purlieus of popular and high culture more than a hundred years later.

This course focuses on the ways that the politics of race in America intersect with performances both on and off the stage. We will look at a number of interdisciplinary approaches to American racial formation and discuss issues such as racial impersonation and blackface minstrelsy, orientalism, racial triangulation, and contemporary immigration. We will also look more closely at how theater - as work, practice, and institution rather than simply as metaphor - manages particular kinds of racial encounters. Readings will include historical and critical studies such as Ronald Takaki's Iron Cages, Michael Omi and Howard Winant's Racial Formation in the United States, and Philip Deloria's Indians in Unexpected Places as well as a number of plays by Lynn Nottage, David Henry Hwang, and others.

"Super Sleuths: The Making of Modern Detective Fiction" Super Sleuths: The Making of Modern Detective Fiction" investigates the rising popularity of crime fiction over the course of the 19th century and the appearance of its eventual foil, the modern detective, made legendary by Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Among the mysteries we'll take up alongside Dupin's and Holmes's stories are Wilkie Collins's Moonstone, regarded as one of the first detective novels in English. As well we shall consider film's leap into the genre with the likes of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon and the Coen brothers' Fargo.

This course examines travel literature from the Mediterranean basin to the Indian Ocean, and from "utopia" to the moon. The travels were inventions of great minds, and although some of them were inspired by real geographies, they served in imagining a brave new world for their readers. Travel was entertaining at the same time that it was edifying.

Travel literature reveals as much about the world, real or imagined, as about travelers and their cultures, ideologies, histories, and religions. The course follows in the footsteps of crafty Odysseus and pious but pragmatic Sindbad, and enters into the New Atlantis of science and the egalitarian commune of an early modern revolutionary. It ends with an exploration of the unique islands of Robinson Crusoe and the Yahoos of the Enlightenment. Through this literature, we study the civilizations of the Greeks, the Arabs, and the British as men and women from Baghdad to London and from the 8th century BC to the 18th century AD grappled with the terrors and challenges of an ever-changing world.