Semester:
Offered:
Instructor: Dennis Hogan
Meeting time: Tuesday, 3:00-5:00 pm
This seminar introduces students to the history of work and workers in the Americas. We will examine work and labor and their intersections with colonialism, imperialism, and slavery from the nineteenth century through today. The course will also ask how working people have represented themselves, and how they have intervened to change their own lives, and, sometimes, the course of history. Our analysis will encompass racialized, feminized, and unfree labor; domestic and reproductive labor; migrant, casual, and emotional labor, as well as the labor of the artist and the organizer. We will engage with a wide range of historical and literary texts from Latin America and the United States to consider how writers from across the Americas have used literature to consider what it feels like to work, and to refuse work. Course readings may include Solomon Northrup’s 12 Years a Slave, Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, as well as works from theorists such as Sylvia Federici, CLR James, Karl Marx, Kathi Weeks and Raymond Williams.