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This seminar explores the profound relationship between knowledge, power, and the spatialization of racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies through the work of Sylvia Wynter and other critical theorists. Rooted in decolonial, Black feminist, Indigenous, Queer, and Trans frameworks, the course interrogates how European colonialism, empire, and modernity through Enlightenment rationality to biologize difference, spatialize power (e.g., plantations, borders) and legitimize what Wynter describes as the "unbearable wrongness of being." As this course highlights, the nature of knowledge is a reflection of power and cannot be decoupled from the projects of empire, colonialism, and the making of modernity. These projects have functioned to create and maintain racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies that are deeply spatial, biologizing the nation and tying it to space, territory, and geography. Through readings, screenings of Lovecraft Country, and music by Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, and Kendrick Lamar, we will grapple with questions of belonging, queerness, otherness, and the boundaries of the self, nation, and state. The course emphasizes the consequences of not knowing and the liberatory potential of decolonial praxis. |
