Problems in American Literature
Class Information
Instructor: Jerng, Mark
CRN: 53333
Time: R 3:10-6:00
Location: 120 Voorhies
Breadth: Later American
Focus: Genre, Interdiscipline, Method
Description
Topic--
Law and Literature: Racial Differentiation, Social Life, and Speculative Knowledge
Course Description--
This seminar has two research areas that we will work to put into dialogue: 1) genealogies of critical race theory in legal studies; 2) speculative writing. With the first, we will focus on the ways in which critical race theorists have analyzed the law and its reproduction of norms of freedom, property, contract, personhood, corporations, and violence. We will think through the law as a regulatory apparatus that uses grammars and conventions such as the counterfactual, precedent in-place-of history, tort, causation, and testimony. With the second, we will focus on writers using practices of speculation across various modes of writing (historical speculation; what ifs; time-travel; science fiction) that invite alternative knowledge structures, ways of being and making realities possible, and worldbuilding. We will develop our approaches for thinking across legal and literary modes of thinking. We will have some explicit help in the form of the legal theorist Derrick Bell whose major critical work consists in large part of speculative fiction. Throughout we will decipher intersections across law and speculative writing that reproduce and legitimize modes of individuality, freedom, incorporation, justice, contract, and property-making entangled with racial capitalism. But we will cultivate re-imaginings of sociality, collectivization, and sense-making drawing from the speculative worldmaking of Bell, Octavia Butler, Cherie Dimaline, W.E.B. DuBois, N.K. Jemisin, Victor Lavalle, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Patricia Williams, among others.
Texts will not be ordered through the UC Davis bookstore. The texts that you will need to purchase are: Octavia Butler, Kindred; Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves; Victor Lavalle's Destroyer; Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning; NK Jemisin, The City We Became. All other readings will be provided as .pdfs
Readings:
[Speculative Fiction]
Sherman Alexie, "The Sin-Eaters"
Octavia Butler, Kindred
Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves
N.K. Jemisin, "The Ones Who Stay and Fight," The City We Became
Victor Lavalle's Destroyer
Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning
[Historiography & Historical Speculation]
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America
[Speculative Law]
Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism
Sora Han, "Letters of the Law"
Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights
[Critical Essays and Book chapters across legal and literary studies, Black studies, Native American Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies]
Kimberle Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color"
------------------. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics"
Jacques Derrida, "The Force of Law" (pages 21-48) in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice
Wai Chee Dimock, "Pain and Compensation," from Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (140-67)
Patrice Douglass, "The Claim of Right to Property: Social Violence and Political Right"
Stanley Fish, "Force" from Doing What Comes Naturally
Sora Han, "Slavery as Contract: Betty?s Case and the Question of Freedom"
Manu Karuka, "The Prose of Countersovereignty," "Shareholder Whiteness" in Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
Mari Matsuda, "On Causation"
Imani Perry, "Producing Personhood" (pages 42-61) from Vexy Thing: Gender and Liberation
Audra Simpson, "Borders, Cigarettes, and Sovereignty" in Mohawk Interruptus
Cass Sunstein, "Reasoning and Legal Reasoning"; "Analogical Reasoning" in Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict
Legal Cases:
Mashpee v. New Seabury Corp.
Johnson v. M'Intosh
Plessy v. Ferguson
Other cases referred to and discussed in critical essays
Grading
Depends on student goals. Options to choose across:
1) literature review/research area synthesis assignments
2) seminar paper / proto-article-length assignment
3) creative non-fiction that engages the course's primary materials
Texts
TBD