Courses

Staring in the 1980s, ‘French theory,’ an eclectic corpus of philosophy, political theory, psychoanalytic and feminist thought, became a catalyzing force in North-American intellectual culture. But while ‘theory’ came to be associated with France, it was in reality a product of transcontinental colonial and postcolonial intellectual encounters and exchanges. Seminal thinkers such as Althusser, Cixous, Derrida, Fanon, Glissant, Balibar, Bourdieu and Rancière were either born or began their careers in Algeria or the Francophone Caribbean. Others, such as Kristeva and Todorov, were immigrants from Eastern Europe. This course approaches ‘French theory’ from a decolonial perspective resituating its leading thinkers, intellectual contributions and political interventions  in light of colonial hybridity, postcolonial migration, the global circulation of Marxism and psychoanalysis, and American branding and marketing.

The course is divided into five units, each organized around a pair of complementary terms. Neither these categories nor the readings associated with them are in any way exhaustive; rather, they introduce a few important theoretical conversations, notably at the intersections of literary and historical studies, the two fields in which the instructors of this course are trained. During the semester we explore questions about authorship and reading, canonicity and the worlding of literature, documents and emotions, and the boundedness and/or fluidity of selves and others.