Category: Archive courses

Close reading and analysis of No texts in Japanese, with some attention to Kyogen. Discussion of categorization, structure, imagery, style, mode, theme, authorship, source material, theory, and problems of translation. Prerequisite: permission of instructor.

This micro-seminar explores the political importance of art in responding to the violence of dictatorship, war, and extractive economies. It is organized around the spring 2020 visits of four scholar-artists from Puerto Rico and Peru. Puerto Rican visual anthropologist and filmmaker Patricia Alvarez Astacio is an Assistant Professor at Brandeis University. Her films and written work critically explore the Peruvian alpaca wool supply chain analyzing how, through the intervention of development projects, Indigenous women arti- sans and their aesthetic traditions are interpolat- ed into “ethical fashion” manufacturing networks. In their individual and collective art projects, Peruvian artists and activists Karen Bernedo, Jorge Miyagui and Mauricio Delgado reveal the connections between ongoing colonial process- es, the political violence of the 1980s and 90s, and contemporary manifestations of gendered, racialized, and other forms of structural violence. Their collective Museo Itinerante Arte por la Memoria, a mobile museum for art and memory, won the 2014 Prince Claus Award for “outstanding achievement of visionaries at the front-line of culture and development.” The seminar will meet four times and explore the power of art in uncovering and contesting the hidden foundations of violence. We will explore how art can create and sustain political and cultural counternarratives that resist racial capitalism, patriarchy, and the ongoing marginalization of Indigenous peoples in Peru. We will read texts that address the particular context of Peru, as well as broader theoretical works about art, cultural agency, memory, and politics.
Course Meetings:
Apr. 9, Apr. 23, May 7, May 21
10:30am – 12:00pm | Zoom (Synchronous)
Events (registration and related info forthcoming):
April 20 | Patricia Alvarez Astacio Screening & Discussion
Apr. 22 | Patricia Alvarez Astacio Visual Anthropology Workshop
May 18 |  Peruvian Artists Panel Discussion
For questions about this course, please contact MarÍa Elena GarcÍa at meg71@uw.edu.
 

Improvisational Crossings:
Social Dance as Interdisciplinary Intervention
HUM 597A (1 credit, C/NC)
Instructors:
Naomi Bragin (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell), Juliet McMains (Dance, UW Seattle), and
Jade Power Sotomayor (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, UW Bothell)
Meeting Dates:
All sessions aside from the colloquium weekend will meet in Communications 218D
• Friday, March 30, 4:30-6:30 pm
• Friday, April 6, 4:30-6:30 pm
• Friday, April 13, 5-7 pm–Meeting with visiting guests
• Saturday, April 14, 10 am-5 pm–Colloquium Research Presentations and Roundtable
• Sunday, April 15, 12-6 pm–Dance Workshops at Washington Hall
• Friday, April 20, 4:30-6:30 pm
This microseminar serves as preparation for and engagement with an April 2018 colloquium that brings together six dance/ing scholars for two days of lectures, workshops, and dialogue that address border crossings through the lens of improvisational social dances. The microseminar includes visits with important voices in Dance Studies including Jasmine Johnson, Kareem Khubchandani, and Marta Savigliano. The course includes a brief overview of how social dancing has been historically framed, followed by an introduction to the colloquium participants’ various engagements with social dance. By looking at social dance less as a fixed, static category, and more as a term that describes the relationality produced through movement practices, this microseminar asks students to examine dances of togetherness, or “together dancing,” and to think how this dancing can be both lens and method for engaging in interdisciplinary inquiry. The course thinks at the intersection of conventional disciplinary divisions, by centering improvisation as an analytic that can challenge Dance Studies’ historical investments in the choreographic while simultaneously calling upon an embodied conceptualization not traditionally present in Music and Sound Studies.

In addition to attending all scheduled meetings, the lectures and dance workshops, students will be asked to complete reading assignments in advance of seminar meetings and write a short final
reflection. See improvisationalcrossings.org for a schedule and information about colloquium participants.
For more information contact Jade Power Sotomayor (jyps@uw.edu).
Naomi Macalalad Bragin is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell, where she teaches courses in black performance theory, performance research, and dance improvisation. Her current project, Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics, traces the role of freestyle street dance in the generation of black political aesthetics.
Juliet McMains is Professor of Dance at UW Seattle and the author of Spinning Mambo into Salsa: Caribbean Dance in Global Commerce (2015) and Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry (2006).

Jade Power Sotomayor is Assistant Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at UW Bothell. She is a performance scholar and practitioner writing and teaching about US Latinx
performance and a Puerto Rican bomba cultural worker and dancer. Her current project is titled ¡Habla!: Speaking Bodies in Latinx Dance and Performance.

The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities,
education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in
advance at: 206.543.6450/V, 206.543.6452/TTY, 206.685.7264 (FAX), or e-mail at dso@u.washington.edu.

C LIT 252B  / JSIS 480A
Narco Narrative
TTh 12:30-2:20
Prof. Cynthia Steele
cynthias@uw.edu
As the activity and the violence of drug cartels keeps expanding in the Americas, fiction, films and TV series about the ‘Drug Wars’ continue to thrive. From novels like Don Winslow’s The Cartel to Netflix series like “Narcos,” and “El Chapo,” readers and viewers in the U.S. and Latin America continue to be transfixed by stories of drug kingpins rising from rags to riches, then dying in a volley of gunfire, or evading the law and then falling victim to the allures of Hollywood. We will examine the history of drug usage and its regulation in the U.S. and Latin America, including the rise of cartels in Colombia and in Mexico, through readings of novels and viewings of films and TV series. You will write a 5-page comparative essay, participate in a group presentation, and keep a journal of your readings and viewings. Regular class attendance and active participation in discussion are essential. Students are required to subscribe to Netflix for the duration of the course. Novels will include Don Winslow’s The Cartel, Juan Pablo Villalobos’ Down the Rabbit Hole and Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom Cons. Viewings will include the new Netflix series “Narcos Mexico” and the films Traspatio/Backyard and Sicario. All texts are translated or subtitled, so no knowledge of Spanish is required, though it is very welcome.
Canvas Site:
https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1254320
 
 
 
 

Winter 2021 | 1 credit (graded) | Open to graduate students only | Add code required
HUM 597C
First Nations Art, Resistance, and Governance:
Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw Art Against Extraction
Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, School of Art + Art History + Design, UW Seattle
In this microseminar we explore art of the Northwest Coast and how it functions within the political realm of Canada’s Truth and Reconcilation (TRC) Commission and in the face of extractive industries on unceeded territory and the devestation they can bring to Indigenous lands and sovereignty. We ask what the search for truth and reconciliation has meant and could mean when artists and communities, rather than politicians and government officials, do the work of truth telling. In 2008, Canada created a TRC to chronicle the trauma of Native children who had been separated from their families and sent to residential boarding schools. In both cases, visual artists and other cultural agents revealed the limitations of official state-authorized investigations and the importance of including everyday people in the work of memory and protest. Specifically, artists helped reveal how the historical nature of the TRC gaze (“reckoning with the past”) made it difficult to see the ongoing acts of violence including the work of extractive industries on Indigenous lands.
This course will look to the experiences of the Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw Nations in using art to defend their land and territories from the social and environmental harms of extractive industry.
We plan to invite two First Nations artists: Gwaii Edenshaw and Rande Cook for discussion with the seminar about their visual art, their political activities, and their involvement in both short and feature-length films.
We will screen SGaawaay K’uuna (Edge of The Knife), a 2018 Canadian drama film co-directed by Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown. It is the first feature film spoken only in the Haida language. Set in 19th-century Haida Gwaii, it tells the classic Haida story of a traumatized and stranded man transformed into Gaagiixiid, the wildman. SGaawaay K’uun won Best Canadian Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival. In conjunction with Rande Cook’s visit, we will screen his mini-documentary, Tree of Life and talk to the artists about the intersections of chiefly responsibility, logging, and visual art.
Learning Objectives
Students will engage directly with First Nations artists from British Columbia to gaining an understanding of how artwork functions within a political and cultural context. Students will be able to articulate the history and ongoing responsibilities, both personal and institutional, of relationships with the Indigenous people in our region and their tangible and intangible expressions of identity and heritage.
Course Meetings
Tuesdays, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM PST
Janurary 26, Feburary 2, 9, 16
Remote learning via Zoom
For questions on this course, please visit https://tinyurl.com/HUM597.

This seminar will expose graduate students from across the University to a selection of key works across the social sciences and critical humanities in the general areas of “religions, cultures, and civilizations” or RCC. The RCC field engages the diversity of cultural and religious life throughout the world, anchored by concrete studies of world areas, histories, cultural and political movements, and religious institutions and practices.  This field exposes students to theoretical and international debates about religions, cultures, and power. Through a survey of the major concepts, theories, and controversies in these debates, the seminar will help both masters and doctoral students gain a solid appreciation of the fundamental approaches to RCC-related works. This syllabus is the work of a collective of faculty who serve the Religions, Cultures, and Civilizations (RCC) field of the JSIS PhD Program, though each iteration is unique to the instructor’s interests.  This seminar is open to any interested graduate student at the University of Washington.
 

The Black Embodiments Studio is a critical arts writing incubator that explores enactments of, and arts criticism surrounding, black embodiments in contemporary art. Residents meet for daylong intensives January 17-18 and February 29-March 1 to discuss diverse models of writing on black embodiments and to gain intimate contact with artists, curators, and scholars whose
work on black embodiments models innovation, accessibility, and criticality. Over the course of the quarter, residents will visit 5 exhibitions and develop their own short-form arts criticism.
Interested graduate students and postgraduates should submit a 2-page letter of inquiry in PDF format to Dr. Kemi Adeyemi (kadeyemi@uw.edu) by 5 pm PST on December 20, 2019. This letter should detail the applicant’s critical practice, how thinking through black embodiments and contemporary art may be generative to it, and what they hope to gain through The Black Embodiments Studio. Ten residents will be notified of their acceptance by December 25, 2019.
2 credit microseminar || HUM 596A
critical writing + blackness + aesthetics
blackembodiments.org
The Black Embodiments Studio is produced in collaboration with the Jacob Lawrence Gallery and is supported by the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Explores the inscription of Indonesian histories and stories. Focuses on oral traditions, oral testimonies, and archives. Investigates how oral and written testimonies enter historical archives. Explores theoretical work on literary and performance traditions as they relate to nationalism and Islam in Indonesia. Offered: jointly with HSTAS 534.
 

Add code required, by permission of instructor.                                                                                                                        Course meetings and requirements: Friday, march 14, 3-5pm, Communications 202. Pre-conference seminar session. Please note this is the last day of instruction for winter quarter. Conference, March 19-23. Attend at least 4 panel sessions and 1 workshop at the conference.  2 required sessionis will be announced when the preliminary program has been posted online in December 2013; other sessions should be selected according to your interested. Monday, March 24, 1:00-3:00pm, Communications 202. Post-conference seminar session.