This team-taught seminar (cross-listed with the D Italian and Critical Theory) examines histories of racialized violence–slavery, colonialism, the Nazi genocide– and their convergence at select border sites. Our primary works are mostly drawn from Francophone and Italian geographies. We turn to literature, visual media and multidisciplinary studies to sound out the reverberations of violent histories at contemporary borders such as Lampedusa, Gaza, Melilla or Calais. How do contemporary border technologies and policies reanimate histories of extraction, racism and empire? How are borders felt and sensed by migrants who seek to cross them? How do literature and film, in conjunction with theory, help us better understand race and racialization and to question dominant discourses of humanity, human rights and humanitarianism? How do testimonies by migrants and their aesthetic representations resist border violence, historicize the refugee “crisis,” and convey new modes of becoming or belonging? How do we understand poesis– making, self-fashioning, world-building– as lived practices as well as aesthetic representations that show us the power of life to endure and escape the border’s power over life? We will consider theories of biopolitics, necropolitics, anti-Blackness, postcoloniality, and migration, paying particular attention to the critical and creative resources of postcolonial and Black radical thought.

Our readings and screenings include: Literary works by Primo Levi, Marie NDiaye, Laila Lalami, Valeria Luiselli Theoretical writings by Enzo Traverso, Saree Makdisi, Hortense Spillers, Sylvia Winter, Alexander Weheliye, Saidiya Hartman, Achille Mbembe, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Nicolas de Genova Visual works by Dagmawi Yimer, Hélène Crouzillat & Laetitia Tura, Forensic Architecture, Isaac Julien, John Akomfrah