Jump to: Part 1: Utopia/Dystopia | Part 2: End of the World | Part 3: Reimagining the Future

Part 1: The Utopian Imagination, the Dystopian Projection

Tuesday, January 16 (Week 1)

• Meet in Hance in a plenary session for a (re)introduction to the class
• READ: Maxwell Chambers and His Complicated Connections to Davidson College
• WATCH: Davidson College’s Painful History and a Path Forward
• WRITE: Before your Moodle post, in your red notebook–Without looking it up, what do you know about Davidson College’s founding and first 100 years of history? Write no more than 250 words
• MOODLE: Timeline or Chronology
• PLENARY: Commemoration, History, and the Future

Thursday, January 18 AM

• READ: Thomas More, Utopia and Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (excerpts from The Utopia Reader)
• MOODLE: Post a short description of a particularly compelling version of utopia from a text, film or other work of art. How does it align with More’s description?
• PLENARY: Mini-lecture on the origins of the term

Thursday, January 18 PM

• READ: Códice Mendoza (1-17, verso and recto; pay special attention to the images)
• PLENARY: How do we make sense of a Codex?

Tuesday, January 23 (Week 2)

• READ: Review Códice Mendoza & Utopia
• SECTION: Early Modern Utopias

Thursday, January 25 AM

• READ: Friedrich Engles and Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) (pp. 173-217)
• MOODLE: Preconceived notions
• PLENARY: Lecture/discussion of the Manifesto

Thursday, January 25 PM

• READ: Friedrich Engles and Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)  (cont.)
• SECTION: The Individual and the Community

Tuesday, January 30 (Week 3)

• READ: Julia Foulkes, “Manifestos,” Isadora Duncan, “I See America Dancing” (1927) and Martha Graham, “Athlete of God…” (1953), Luigi Russolo, Art of Noise: A Futurist Manifesto (1913); Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto (1918)
• PLENARY: Manifestos, Meaning, and Making

Thursday, February 1 AM

• MOODLE: Futurism, Dadaism, Oh My!
• SECTION: Composing Fluxus

Thursday, February 1 PM

• WRITE: Draft of Paper 3 
• PLENARY: Fluxus Happening

Monday, February 5

• Submit Paper 3 on Moodle by 9am

Tuesday, February 6  (Week 4)

• READ: Mayakovsky, et. al., “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (1912); Dostoevsky, Notes from The Underground, Part I, “Underground” 3-29, & excerpts from Ellison’s Invisible Man (133-135) & Zamiatin’s We (136); optional: Chernyshevsky’s “Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream,” from What is to Be Done, 104-122
• PLENARY: Dostoevsky and His Time

Thursday, February 8 AM

• READ: Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, Part II, “Apropos of Wet Snow,” 29-91
• SECTION: Notes From the Underground

Thursday, February 8 PM

• READ: No new reading
• PLENARY: Dostoevsky Wrap-up and Draft Feedback 

Part 2: This Is How the World Ends

Tuesday, February 13 (Week 5)

• READ: Sarah Groustra, Radio Man (full play); Elinor Fuchs’ “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet”
• MOODLE: Post one question you’d like to ask the playwright; the question can be about the play you read, or about the work of a playwright more generally.
• PLENARY: How to Read a Play

Thursday, February 15 AM 

• READ: Groustra and Fuchs, cont.
• SECTION: Reading a Play

Thursday, February 15 PM 

• WRITE: Prepare questions for the playwright 
• PLENARY: Visit with Sarah Groustra via Zoom 

Tuesday, February 20 (Week 6)

• READ: Nahuatl Narrative and Poetry After the Invasion of Tenochtitlan from Miguel León Portilla, Broken Spears
• PLENARY Flowers and Songs of Sorrow

Thursday, February 22 AM

• READ: Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (pp. 9-17; 27-29); Spanish version for those who can read it.
• SECTION: Apocalypse in Real Time

Thursday, February 22 PM

• READ: Estes, “Siege,” from The Past is Our Future
• SECTION: Native and Indian Futures

Friday, February 23 

• MOODLE: Research Paper Proposal by 5 p.m.

Monday, February 26

• MOODLE: Campus Commentary #3

Tuesday, February 27  (Week 7)

• WATCH: Paula Vogel, Indecent (available on Digital Theatre+) 
• Read: Jill Dolan, “Utopia in Performance’” (pp.1-15 required; the rest is optional)
• MOODLE: Choose a 2-page spread from the Dolan reading to annotate; based on those annotations choose a single sentence/quote/idea that you’d like to discuss in your section on Thursday – post your annotation and your discussion idea on Moodle.
• PLENARY: Utopian Performative

Thursday, February 29 AM

• WATCH: Paula Vogel, Indecent
• SECTION: Discuss Indecent

Thursday, February 29 PM

• READ: No assignment
• PLENARY: Working with secondary sources and the “Scholarly Discussion”
• MOODLE: Library Worksheet

Spring Break – No class

Friday, March 1

• Depart for DC around noon

Monday, March 4

• Return from DC (approx. arrival time4:00-5:00 p.m.; You can also depart from DC, either Sunday or Monday)

Tuesday, March 12 (Week 8)

• READ: David Wojnarowicz, 7 Miles a Second (CBR; PDF)
• CBR Readers: Windows; Mac
• Moodle: Scenes from 7 Miles a Second
• PLENARY: Art, AIDs, and Survival

Thursday, March 14 AM

• READ: 7 Miles a Second (cont.) (CBR; PDF)
• SECTION: Art, AIDs, and Mourning

Thursday, March 14 PM

• READ: 7 Miles a Second (cont.)
• PLENARY: Guest lecture/conversation with curator Lia Newman; MEET AT VAC

Friday, March 15

• MOODLE: Dr. Boyer is so kind he gave us this extension… I think I’ll prove I know how to use Chicago NB.

Part 3: Reimagining the Future

Tuesday, March 19 (Week 9)

• WATCH: Bill Moyers & Bill T. Jones, “Still/Here”
• READ: Arlene Croce, “Discussing the Undiscussable”
• MOODLE: What is undiscussable?
• PLENARY: Artmaking, Illness, and the Responsibility of the Critic

• READ: Jared Sexton, “Afropessimism: The Unclear Word“; Mark Dery, “Black to the Future“
• SECTION: Afrofuturism

• PLENARY: Gabrielle Bell

• READ: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993), chapters 1-5
• MOODLE: How things fall apart in Parable of the Sower
• SECTION: How things fall apart in Parable of the Sower

• READ: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 6-14
• MOODLE: Lauren Olamina’s Missing Journal Entries
• SECTION: Butler’s Worldbuilding

• PLENARY: Afrofuturism and Parable of the Sower

• READ: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, chapters 15-25
• MOODLE: The World beyond Parable of the Sower
• SECTION: Building Community at the End of the World

• WATCH: Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men
• MOODLE: Considering the ending of Children of Men
• SECTION: Ethical dilemmas at the end of the world

• READ: No assignment
• PLENARY: Effective Altruism, Long termism, and the End of the World, featuring Children of Men, Parable of the Sower, and looking ahead to Space is the Place

Tuesday, April 9 (Week 12)

• WATCH: Sun Ra, Space is the Place (1974)
• READ: Kodwo Eshun, “Synthesizing the Omniverse,” in More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998), 154–163.
• PLENARY: Space is the Place

Thursday, April 11 AM

• WATCH: Sonic Futures: The Music of Afrofuturism [Alondra Nelson, George Clinton, Nona Hendryx, and Vernon Reid]
• LISTEN: André 3000, New Blue Sun (2023)
• SECTION: The Sound of the Future

Thursday, April 11 PM 

• Spring convocation begins at 11:15 a.m.; 12:15 p.m. classes canceled but late afternoon classes do meet
• READ: No assignment
• PLENARY: Suturing together a research paper

Monday, April 15 

• Draft of Research Paper

Tuesday, April 16 (Week 13)

• READ: Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
• MODDLE: Understanding Muñoz
• PLENARY: Queer Theory & Utopias Deferred

Thursday, April 18 AM

• WATCH: Gutierrez and Powerful People, Age and Beauty, Part I
• PLENARY: Staging Possibility

Thursday, April 18 PM

• READ: Foster, “Choreographies of Protest”
• MOODLE: Choreography as Strategy
• SECTION: Strategies of Protest–How we make change/What we make change

Tuesday, April 23 (Week 14) (April 22-30 is Passover) 

• WATCH: ACT UP in Grand Central; ACT UP in St. Patrick’s Cathedral; 
• MOODLE: Legacies of Protest
• SECTION: ACT UP in Action

Thursday, April 25 AM

• HOLD THIS SPOT, FOLKS

Thursday, April 25 PM Last class meeting of HUM 104 

• READ: Nothing. All has been read. Nothing has been read. The cat lives. The cat dies.
• PLENARY: Whither the Humanities?

Wednesday, May 1 (Week 15)

• Verna Miller Case Research & Creative Works Symposium