Studies in Contemporary Literature

Studies in Contemporary Literature

Abolition and Form
Course Number: 
227
Course Catalog Number: 
32286
Course Type or Level: 
Instructor: 
Ramsey McGlazer
Days: 
Tu
Time: 
2-5 pm
Semester: 
Location: 
4104 Dwinelle

Contemporary abolitionist thinking is often discounted or derided in mainstream political discourse. So is literature. Calls to abolish institutions including prisons, detention centers, and policing are framed as out of touch and impossible, as impractical, irresponsible, and politically counterproductive. So too is the reading of fiction and poetry regarded as a waste of time at best, as an adolescent pastime or an armchair indulgence that distracts us from serious work.

In this course, we will consider the opposing wager that both literature and abolition are worth taking seriously. At the same time, we’ll ask, following Franco Basaglia, whether a shared way of being seen as “without seriousness or respectability” might offer grounds for comparative study. How have literary texts sought to prefigure abolition? How, conversely, have abolitionist theories and practices learned from and otherwise been sustained by literature? What should we make of the ongoing resistance to both, despite the new abolitionism’s increasing public visibility?

We’ll take distance from the sentimental literary traditions associated with some strands in the struggle to end chattel slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Instead, we’ll focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts (poems, novels, and essays as well as some films) that prepare for, enact, or challenge us to imagine abolition at the level of form, whether by abolishing the poetic “I,” staging “the end of the world,” or radically reconfiguring narrative, syntax, or historical causality. How, without lapsing into sentimentality or self-congratulation, can we account for the central place of literature and imagination in key abolitionist projects? How, at the same time, can we take the measure of literature’s limits as an institution, especially in the context of the challenges facing attempts to do away with policing, prisons, property, borders, or war?

We will study theories of “abolition democracy” and instances of abolition, both real and imagined, in the US, Latin America, and Europe, where we’ll pay particular attention to anticapitalist and antipsychiatric movements in Italy. In each case, our focus will be on the relationship between abolition and literary form. Attending to this relationship will also mean addressing utopias and dystopias; surrealism, science fiction, and “speculative documentary”; antiblackness and the problem of analogy; and recent debates in literary studies about the status of institutions and forms. We’ll study the work of theorists including Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Fredric Jameson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Dylan Rodríguez, and Juliana Spahr. Even while we attend to their form, we’ll read these critical works alongside texts and films by Nanni Balestrini, Amiri Baraka, Lizzie Borden, Leonora Carrington, Diamela Eltit, Haile Gerima, Alexis Gumbs, Charles Olson, Marge Piercy, José Revueltas, Amelia Rosselli, and Paolo Volponi, among others.