Theories and Representations of the State

“The state thinks the subject, too.”
– Wahneema Lubiano

The shifting fortunes of the nation-state in the contemporary moment have been a major critical preoccupation in recent American studies scholarship. Whatever else, it seems clear that the established, modern form of this hyphenated entity is in the process of significant transformation, or in other words, that the historical articulation of national sentiment to the apparatus of the state has eroded. Despite the residual, cynical reliance of official, state discourse on a nationalist tropology, nationalist identifications have arguably detached from the institutions of the territorial state, just as the operation of state power no longer depends on the effective mobilization of a national public. In attending to the break-up of the nation-state couple, American studies has proven far more attentive to the afterlives of nationalism than to the modalities of state power after nationalism. This course is constructed on the idea that a critical engagement with present transformations in the practices of state power, and its reproduction at the level of the social subject, benefits from reading broadly across theories and representations of the state, with an emphasis on marxist theory, Foucault and other power/knowledge thinkers, feminist theory, and critical understandings of the state that emerge from queer analytics and from race and ethnic studies.

A few key selections of classical political economy (e.g., Locke, Hobbes, Hume) will likely form the pre-text (or deep background/ recommended reading) for the class. Primary course materials will probably include GWF Hegel, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxembourg, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Michael Taussig, Nancy Fraser, Catherine MacKinnon, David Harvey, Doug Henwood, Wahneema Lubiano, Cindy Patton, Ruth Gilmore. Reading will also include a small selection of literary and popular cultural work that marks critical or theoretical interventions in questions of the state from within these different domains of representational practice: possible choices include Paul Beatty’s Tuff, Ana Castillo’s So Far From God, the SciFi channel series Battlestar Galactica. (I will be in touch with enrolled students towards the end of the fall term as I finalize the reading list. )