Instructor: Dr. Rosanne Sia
Examination in depth of selected topics in gender, race, and sexuality. Consult the Workday Student course schedule for course offerings. May be repeated for credit. Recommended pre-requisites: either all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102 or third-year standing.
Term 1
Title: Sounds of Race and Empire
Description: What role does sound play in the making and unmaking of race and empire? Sound has played an important role in disciplining and controlling racialized communities, marking and containing some racialized bodies as “unruly,” “dangerous,” or “noisy.” It has also played a key role in imperial technologies that have enabled systems of communication, surveillance, and warfare over colonial populations and occupied territories. Sound, however, has also been a vital source of joy and worldmaking for marginalized communities that has enabled defiant claims to place and empowered acts of self-making. Sound also exceeds the realm of human audibility, asking us to listen in new ways to the non-human world from rivers and oceans to plant growth and undersea life. This course will consider these themes with readings by scholars such as Dylan Robinson, Fred Moten, Shana Redmond, Jonathan Sterne, Marie Thompson, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, Jennifer Stoever, Alexandra T. Vásquez, Alex E. Chávez, Deborah Vargas, Licia Fiol-Matta, Tom McEnany, Josh Kun, Alejandra Bronfman, Roshanak Kheshti, George Lipsitz, Nina Eidsheim, Karen Bakker, Gaye Theresa Johnson, and Daphne Brooks.