This class tracks the institutionalization of what Michel Foucault has termed “biopolitics,” or the targeted regulation of populations, as a widespread technology in the eras of neoliberal capitalism ushered in by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. It will illustrate that this process was particularly effective when operating through the trope of “home,” and focuses on cultural production around conceptions of "home" from the late 1970s into the twenty-first century. We will examine the ways in which “home” – as a geographical and ideological site – can be read as a key site where oppressed people have been marginalized since the demise of traditional imperialisms. The “texts” (literature and film) we shall examine are produced by diasporic peoples of color currently living in the US and UK whose work resists and reappropriates exclusive “home” sites. Specifically, we will examine the literature of Michelle Cliff, Jessica Hagedorn, and Jackie Kay, and the films of Hanif Kureishi. In doing so, we will seek to excavate the ways in which neoliberal biopolitics pervade notions of “home” at various sites: in the post-colonial education and schooling in 1980s Jamaica; in experiences of post-colonial, Pakistani diasporas residing in Thatcherite London; in U.S. consumerism, militarism, and hegemonic notions of beauty in the Philippines during the Marcos era; and in the ideological and physical violence deployed by state institutions and exploitative media in contemporary Britain. Together, these ostensibly disparate "texts" piece together a puzzle that elucidates the ways that biopolitical mandates promoted by US and UK neoliberalism shape exclusive home sites. Such mandates regulate populations through categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality, which subsequently assimilate social identities to acceptable formations of “home.”



Required "texts":

Cliff, Michelle. "Abeng."

Hagedorn, Jessica. "Dogeaters."

Kay, Jackie. "Trumpet."

Foucault, Michel. "History of Sexuality, Volume I."

Kureishi, Hanif. "My Beautiful Launderette" (film).

Kureishi, Hanif. "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid" (film).