Module description

This module engages with acclaimed cultural texts that bring into focus the relationship between politics, economics and violence in diverse contexts, with a particular focus on the Americas. We will place emphasis on cultural confrontations with the precarity generated through conflict, inequality and ongoing patterns of capitalistic accumulation by dispossession, and we will explore some of the urgent ways this dispossession has been resisted. We will also consider the aesthetic issues that emerge as authors and artists broach violence and precarity, and examine contemporary deployments and critiques of ethics. Primary texts will be read in dialogue with seminal theoretical works by, amongst others, Achille Mbembe, Michel Foucault, Sayak Valencia, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben and Cristina Rivera Garza.

Recommended Preparatory Reading

Bolaño, Roberto. 2666 (2004).

The following secondary texts will introduce you to some of the key themes and debates broached in the module:

Franco, Jean. 2013. Cruel Modernity. Durham: Duke UP.
 Lugo, Alejandro. 2008. Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism, and Conquest at the U.S.-Mexico Border. Texas: Texas UP.
 Banerjee, Subhabrata Bobby. 2008. “Necrocapitalism,” Organization Studies 29.12: 1541-1563.
 Paley, Dawn. 2014. Drug War Capitalism. Edinburgh: AK Press.
 Mbembe, Achille. 2003. ‘Necropolitics’. Trans. Libby Meintijes. Public Culture 15.1: 11-40.
 Judith Butler. 2006. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.
 W. J. T., Mitchell. 2011. Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present . Chicago, University of Chicago Press. (introduction)
 Jacques Rancière. 2006. ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 7.1.
 Hallin, Daniel. ‘Neoliberalism, social movements and change in media systems in the late twentieth century.’ The Media and Social Theory. Ed. David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee . London: Routledge, 2008: 43-58.
 Nixon, R., 2011. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
 Barberán Reinares, Laura. 2015. Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature: Transnational Narratives from Joyce to Bolaño. New York: Routledge.