Proposed Courses, Sandra Zito

 

Upper Division Modern Europe

 

Divided Cities in Europe

This course explores the history of three divided cities in pre- and post-cold war Europe in terms of the spatial effects of religious, ethnic, and ideological partition on everyday lives, and on the definitions of peace and war, legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence, and the internal and external borders of Europe, European identity, Occidentalism and Orientalism. The cities under analysis are Berlin, Belfast, Nicosia, and Mostar.

 

Upper Division Transnational and Comparative World History Courses

 

Histories of Partition: Drawing Borders and Identities

This world history course compares and contrasts case studies of partitions and borders in the twentieth century, including India, Palestine-Israel, Cyprus, and Bosnia through an array of primary and secondary sources, from maps and diplomatic accords to documentary film and graphic novels. It explores the origins and effects of partition on everyday lives in three regions of the globe. Topics will include the relationships between state formation, political borders, state violence, racial capitalism, nationalism, secularism, democracy, religious differences, ethnic and racial identifications.

 

Spaces of Exclusion in the Mediterranean World

This class explores the history and architecture of national, social, religious, racial and class exclusion in North Africa, Southern Europe and the Middle East. Case studies include Jewish ghettos, Kasbahs, immigrant detention in Lampedusa, Italy, Spanish exclaves Ceuta and Melilla in Morocco, suburban development in the West Bank, and British sovereign military bases Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus.

 

Tourisms of War

This class explores the relationships between the historical preservation of battlefields, military bases, and war reenactments in the “defense” and maintenance of national histories within a transnational framework. Case studies include U.S. Civil War memorials and reenactments, Normandy Beach and the Nazi Atlantic Wall in France, Holocaust memorials in the United States, Europe, and Israel, and public tours of the US-Mexico border.

 

Graduate Level Seminar

 

Necropolitics or Cosmopolitics: Is a New World Possible?

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar examines critical political theories of the state, from Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics to theories that think and feel beyond the nation-state, such as diasporic public spheres and autonomous social, cultural and workers collectives. As neoliberal security states and fiscal austerity policies proliferate across states within the global economy, nation-states and transnational institutions no longer treat sovereign peoples as a biological species to maintain the health and welfare of, but as disposable supplements to be cast out of the polis and the economy, held indefinitely within prisons, debt or low-wage labor, or war, immigrant or refugee detention camps. However, alternative political, social and cultural movements have emerged, principally to resist neoliberal free-trade laws, such as the Zapatistas, World Social Forum, ATTAC, No Border Network, the Indignados movement, indigenous environmental activism in the global south, and Occupy Wall Street, which are often organized around cosmopolitan, transcultural or postnational theories. This course examines alternative transnational political organizations in light of a proliferating dominant transnational mode of governance that is putting entire populations of peoples to death, or reducing them to the living dead.

 

The Visual Politics of Borders and Borderlands

This graduate seminar analyzes cultural representations of borders and borderlands as a lens to discuss the visual politics of states and state borders. How do artists’ conceptions and interventions on the geopolitics of borders contribute to an understanding of the visual mechanisms of the state control of the movements of labor and capital? What is the relationship between the visual mechanisms of border and passport controls to the reproduction of individual and group racial, ethnic, national and religious identifications? How do critical theories of borders, state power, state surveillance mechanisms, and racial profiling contribute to understanding visual representations of borders and borderlands? Visual and theoretical texts to be assessed include Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ursula Biemann, Isaac Julien, Alfredo Jaar, Teddy Cruz, Josh Kun, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, Eyal Wiezman, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Frantz Fanon, Fredrik Barth, Paul Virilio, Étienne Balibar, Wendy Brown, Walter Mignolo, and Jared Sexton.