Literary Responses to Disaster & Repression
Disasters are breeding grounds for grief, heartache, loss, and physical pain. And either as a form of repressing that pain or translating it, people have a tendency to respond and react to it. Similarly, political repression can also lead to breeding grounds of grief, heartache, loss, and physical torture. Disaster and repression share a relationship to the type of trauma and suffering that comes with having a complete loss of control over survival. In this course we will look closely at the creative responses and riposts to Hurricane Katrina, the persecution of Adivasis in India, the Bhopal Gas Tragedy caused by Union Carbide in 1984, Chernobyl, colonialism, the partition of India and Pakistan, the subordination of black people in the United States, and the ‘forgotten wars’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our shared goal is to understand how literary responses to disasters and repression can help us manage the effects of the various forms of trauma and suffering that take shape under hopeless circumstances. We will have conversations addressing how desperation and distress shape choice as well as creativity. We will consider the ethical questions that surround the practice of profiting from disaster. And we will take a closer look at the apparent attraction to shock and chaos that is followed by a collective desire to understand ‘the meaning of it all.’ To effectively tackle these issues and phenomena, students, with the intention of enhancing our discussions in lecture, are encouraged to introduce supplementary resources and materials.
Individual student goals for this course include: public speaking and debate, enhancing critical thinking and problem solving abilities, and intermediate understanding of human rights reform.
*all underlined words are links
Assignments
30% Podcasts (2; due weeks 4 and 7): Taking into account the characters we will encounter throughout this course, the podcasts that you create will illustrate how literature can assist in a form of disaster recovery that neither leads to further repression nor takes advantage of repression in the first place. 20% Medium Article (due Week 9)
30% Final
10% Discussion
10% Attendance
*Most materials for the course are linked on this syllabus. Books needed for the course include: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People* (2009),
Week 1 — April 5, 2018: Introduction; Why study the literary and cultural responses to disaster?
- Listen: Louis Armstrong’s St. James Infirmary* (1928)
- Listen: Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie’s When the Levee Breaks*(1927, Mississippi River Flood Song)
- Screen: Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke (Episodes 1 and 2, 2006)
Week 2 — April 10, 2018: Hurricane Katrina
According to Ruth Gilmore, “anti-infrastructure” — simply put, the development of underdevelopment — is used to strategically create poorer places.
- Listen: This American Life — “After the Flood*” (2005)
- Read: Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine* (pgs 1–21)
April 12, 2018: Disaster Capitalism? Or Creative Destruction and the Art of Transferring Wealth Upwards
The Loss of Public Space and Education in New Orleans
- Read: Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine* (pgs 1–21)
- Listen: Naomi Klein’s “How Power Profits From Disaster*” (2017)
- Read: Andrew Vanacore’s “What New Orleans Can Teach Betsy DeVos About Charter Schools*.” POLITICO, 9 Jan. 2017.
Week 3— April 17, 2018: The Loss of Indigenous Knowledge
The loss of indigenous knowledge is one of the greatest secrets of our time. We all know something has been lost, but we never talk about it. As a result, we have little to no shared understanding of what it is we have lost.
- Read: selections from Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance, Stories. (2015)
- Read: Ananya Roy’s Poverty Capital (pgs 1–40)
April 19, 2018: Precarious Life & UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction
UNISDR has a campaign that looks to indigenous knowledge as a source for reducing risk and disaster.
- Read: selections from Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance, Stories. (2015)
- Be familiar with: UNISDR Policies and Procedures
- MAPS
Week 4 — April 24, 2018: UN Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
UNESCO has campaign for preserving indigenous knowledge for a sustainable future.
- Read: selections from Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Adivasi Will Not Dance, Stories. (2015)
- Read: Vandana Shiva’s “Living Economies” from Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace
- Be familiar with: UNESCO Policies and Procedures
Supplementary:
Shiva’s work is an eco-feminist response to Marx’s section on “primitive accumulation” in Capital Volume 1, Part 8, Chapter 26.
April 26, 2018: Union Carbide
- Listen: “Ek Zahreeli Hawa” (A Poisonous Gas) by Habib Tanvir and performed by Subhapriya Srivatsan.
- Check out: Raghu Rai’s 1984 Photo Documentary of Bhopal and 2001
- Who is Warren Anderson
- Read: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (pages 1–82)
April 26, 2018: The Bhopal Disaster
- Read: Rob Nixon’s Environmentalism of the Poor (pages 45–66)
- Read: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (pages 83–222)
Week 5 — May 1, 2018
- Read: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (pages 223–366)
May 3, 2018
- Read: selections from Julia Kristeva’s Power of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection (1982) “Approaching Abjection” (pages 1–32)
- Read: “‘Voices From Chernobyl’: An Excerpt”
- Screen: “Voices From Chernobyl”
Week 6 — May 8, 2018: Colonialism
- Read: Aimé Césaire’s A Discourse on Colonialism (1955, pages 31–78)
May 10, 2018: Partition
- Read: selections from Urvashi Butalia’s The Other side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
- Read: Jill Didur’s “At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Women’s Partition Narratives” from Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (pages 125–156)
Week 7 — May 15, 2018: Silence and Repression
- Read: selections from Urvashi Butalia’s The Other side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
- Read: Jill Didur’s “At a Loss for Words: Reading the Silence in South Asian Women’s Partition Narratives” from Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (pages 125–156)
May 17, 2018: Double-Consciousness
- WEB Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk
Week 8 —
- Read: Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Conscience of the Court” (1950)
- Read: Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” (1978)
- Screen: Life and Debt
Week 9 — Afghanistan & Iraq
Week 10 — Afghanistan & Iraq
