Spring 2024

Posted in Course Information

ENGL 6262-01: Race and Surface
Professor Peggy Lee

Section Description:
What is a surface? And why and how does it matter for race, criticism, and cultural critique? We will read and make connections across a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary engagements with race and surfaces, from analytic philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, cognition, critical race theory, performance studies, art history, film theory, digital studies, and literary criticism. From inscrutability, interesting, edgy, “mega,” shiny, accessory, or android, we’ll explore how methods of registering surface have ethical and political stakes in a spectrum of feeling humanity, beauty, love, disgust, curiosity, largeness, or smallness. In our readings, we will consider a variety of genres and forms from video art, performance, films, novels, and poetry to scrutinize surface as political and geographic aesthetic, scale, and racial marker.