Critical Theory Emphasis

The course will commence from the idea of the "linguistic turn" that is so frequently nominated as registering an epochal shift in contemporary Anglo-American thought. What this phrase obscures is perhaps as significant as what it thinks it reveals. In immediate terms, the linguistic paradigm that seemingly achieves universal epistemological status in the social sciences in the wake of de Saussure and Lévi-Strauss should now perhaps be considered a formalist and temporary parenthesis in an altogether more sweeping re-evaluation of language and being. This re-evaluation certainly takes us back to the Nietzschean slash across positivist coherence and the ideology of truth, and forwards through the dislocation of western words and worlds that witnesses the return of language—be it in anthropology, cinema, music or literature—that disturbs all claims to proprietary rights and unilateral authority. The languages and obsessions of the west, in travelling elsewhere and becoming worldly, return to disorient the signified. In such spaces, the being of language, the being of the west, is not merely contested and deviated, but is forced to speak again in order to reveal its historical provenance, its patriarchal powers, and with them its illusions, its unconscious, its divisions, its limits...its potential alterity.

Bibliography:
Gloria Anzaldía, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, Kobena Mercer,Welcome to the Jungle. New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place.

Films:
Warner Herzog, Aguirre, Wrath of God, Bruce Beresford, Black Robe, Stephen Frears/Hanif Kurieshi, My Beautiful Laundrette, Mira Nair, Mississippi Masala, Terence Davies, Distant Voices, Still Lives, Tony Gatlif, Latcho Drom, Lee Tamahori, Once Were Warriors.