Homi K. Bhabha (English and Comparative Literature)
First-Year Seminar 63N (Spring Term) Enrollment limited to 12
Wednesday, 3:00-5:00 PM CANVAS SITE
This seminar is attuned to the times we live in while addressing universal concerns of human life and historical experience. The relationship between “peace” and “protest” is essential to the dynamic of democracy. Peace is a necessary political condition for ensuring progress in a fair and just society; it is a shield against the violence and wastage of war. Democratic ideals and institutions are perennially at risk of corruption and decline, at which point “keeping the peace” gives rise to authoritarian policies and policing that threaten fundamental freedoms, rights, and liberties. In such critical conditions, “protest” is an instrument of collective dissent enacted by the “people” (variously defined) to restore their rights and freedoms. The movement-politics initiated by minority groups around the world against systematic disadvantage and discrimination have been pushed to protest when other channels of democratic dialogue have failed. Just as peace “at all costs” often leads to the death of democracy, protest “at all costs” might vitiate the political “goods” and virtues that it seeks to establish. How do we walk the political tightrope between “peace and protest”? How do we establish moral frameworks of negotiation rather than negation? This seminar will approach these questions through the humanistic disciplines of literature, philosophy, art and politics. Literary fictions and protest speeches will be as important to our class conversations as political theory and social media. We will emphasize the intersections between disciplines, and loosen the boundaries between bodies of knowledge, to reveal humanistic spaces of dialogue and action from which we might reach a better understanding of the complex, often contradictory, relationships between peace and protest.