Saqer Almarri

What ties do our bodies have with the world around us and with each other? Who gets to define the human and the non-human? What place does the human-like have in our world of experience? Stories of Our Bodies is a course where students explore the intricate relationship between the world and the human body, the human-like body, and the non-human body. We investigate the connections between sensory, cognitive, and emotional experiences of the world around us. The course is structured around key themes exploring the body and will cover a wide range of media such as fiction, poetry, film, music, and video games, alongside scholarly articles on the body. Classroom discussions will delve into questions about our conceptions about our bodies, our embodiment, our situated knowledge, and the powers that surround and influence our bodies and our perceptions of other people’s bodies.

In postcolonial texts, representation and revolution intersect, as authors, filmmakers, and theorists re-invent literary and cinematic forms and seek to reconceive colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. Through this course, students will compare British, Caribbean, Latin American, South Asian, and African texts, including novels by Conrad, Rushdie, and Salih; films by Pontecorvo and Sembene; and selections from the critical writings of Anderson, Fanon, Said, and Spivak. Students will examine contradictions between Enlightenment concepts of reason, universal freedom, and rights, which established a common humanity of mankind while simultaneously justifying European sovereignty over non-Western peoples. The course examines how tradition and modernity; savagery and civilization; religiosity and secularism; self and other; subjectivity and collectivity; and violence and non-violence played a role in empire and decolonization while challenging received understandings of universalism. Finally, students examine how postcolonial studies is being re-shaped and in turn re-shaping understandings of the "Arab Spring" and the Anthropocene.

Across human history, translation has mediated among traditions, languages, cultures, communities, and their histories. Yet, in the modern colonial projects, translation became a tool not to celebrate difference, but to turn difference into hierarchy. This course examines this relationship between language and colonization. It will cover how colonial projects transformed translation in service of colonization, and how it continues to do so in complex cultural encounters that are marked by differences in power. The course will draw on readings across multiple disciplines and histories to present an overview of the complex web of issues that connect the violence of modern colonization with meanings, languages, practices, and concepts. The course will also explore how the colonized subjects understood this process of linguistic colonization, and how they responded to it across different geographies. Class discussions will revolve around drawing connections between our readings and our understanding of translation both as a practice for colonization as well as in response to colonization.

Western media tends to produce a one-dimensional view of Middle Eastern cultures. The reality of the people is often very different. How do Middle Eastern writers represent themselves and their societies in fiction? How have they reacted to the dramatic changes in the Middle East from the early twentieth century on? In this course, students will consider the continuities and diversities of North African and Middle Eastern cultures by analyzing modern and contemporary novels and poetry, as well as films, from or about Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. The following issues will be tackled: how do novelists translate the changes of their cultures into literary form? What literary traditions do they draw on? How do these reflect the different movements in Islam, and the other religions of the region? What kinds of worldly and personal representations emerge? How have these been changing recently, notably since the Arab Revolutions? How different are novels written in English or French for a global audience from those written in Arabic? What are the effects of reading them in translation? Do the conventions of Western literary criticism work for all literatures?