Instructors: Karen Huang and Matthew Sohm
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:00-5:30pm
Canvas site
Our present moment is often seen as an era of globalization. But what does it mean to inhabit a global world? This course suggests that, to answer this question, it is essential to study how the “global” has been represented, negotiated, and contested from the 1970s to the present. We will cover the pivotal half-century, from the 1970s until 2022, when contemporary globalization emerged in response to the crises of the 1970s and the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, flourished in the aftermath of the Cold War, and encountered new challenges in more recent years. In the first part of the semester, we will examine how the United States and Western Europe shaped (and were, in turn, redefined by) new global connections in the final decades of the Cold War and the first post-Cold War years. In the second half, we will examine some of the contemporary challenges related to globalization in the early twenty-first century. Drawing from a range of sources including novels, short stories, films, treatises, and essays, we will consider how notions of contemporary globalization intersect with issues as varied as race and racialization, national identity, migration, inequality, religion, and cultural belonging. (Image credit: Tiffany Chung, Reconstructing an Exodus History: Flight Routes from Camps and of ODP Cases [2017]).