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How did the Latin verna, which once designated a slave born in his or her master's house, come to signify a populist freedom from mastery: linguistic, aesthetic, political? This graduate seminar will explore the complex history, theory, and politics of the vernacular; its vexed equivalence with presumed synonyms in languages beyond the pale of Europe; and the many concepts with which it has been closely associated. Today the vernacular circulates in a range of disciplines beyond literary studies: in art history, where it describes art by "untrained" creators who do not understand themselves as artists; in architecture, where it refers to "native" design techniques; and in film studies, where Miriam Hansen's notion of "vernacular modernism," for example, has articulated an influential theory of the global diffusion of Hollywood cinema and its localization in various world contexts. Arguably, however, the vernacular has enjoyed its longest history and its widest elaboration in comparative theories of language and literature. From its use by Dante, in the early fourteenth century, to champion the production of literature in the spoken languages of the Italian city-states rather than in Latin, the idea of the vernacular has been entwined with notions of mother tongue, native tongue, indigenous language, natural or "ordinary" language, common language, language of the "folk" or the "people," and thus democratic, grassroots, populist, or progressive politics. The vernacular has informed visions of democratized national culture in Europe (e.g., France, Germany, Britain) as well as anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-hegemonic demands--across the Americas, Asia, and Africa--for the production and the recognition of literatures in languages such as African American Vernacular English, kreyòl, South Asian vernaculars, dialectal Arabic (ʿāmmiyya), and Gĩkũyũ. At the very same time, from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, ideologies of the vernacular have underpinned imperial extensions of the modern European nation-state form and of dominant Enlightenment philosophies of language, driving colonially inflected visions of modernity and modernization projects across the global East and South. From China to Turkey to Egypt, "natural" languages thus were constructed--in every sense--as keys to the present and to progress: scientific, aesthetic, sociopolitical. Even as we explore the liberatory power of the vernacular in this course, then, we also will interrogate its coercive logics. Are the notions at the core of vernacular language politics--namely, that writing should resemble speaking, and that spoken language is language in its most natural or native form--born inside a master narrative? Is it possible to understand language otherwise? In weekly discussions and in final papers for this seminar, students are encouraged to relate their own research to these questions and to assigned texts. Our readings will range widely, including works by Adejunmobi, Anderson, Badiou, Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Dante, Derrida, Ertürk, Herder, Hurston, Mufti, Ngũgĩ, Ong, Pollock, Rousseau, Safouan, Saussure, Shankar, Sorensen, Vološinov, Wei, Zaydān, and Zhou.