Course Description
This course probes identity/difference, postIdentity, self and other, human and post human, gender and post gender. The aim is to problematize both sides of the identity/difference divide, looking at the ways in which identity is consolidated through the constitution of difference and how difference, as a category and practice, in late modernity has been politicized and depoliticized as a site of resistance. The course will examine how the politics of identity has simultaneously politicized and depoliticized the public facilitating a potential for both radical democracy and neoconservatism.
Key concepts include thinking, being, event, affect, autonomy, resentment, responsibility, representation, gender, race, ethnicity, community, citizenship, mobilization, cosmopolitanism, neoimperialism, neocolonialism, virtuality, and performativity
Five questions structure the course: what is postidentity, who lives it and how, how does postidentity function as a site of action, what is left of the concept of citizenship in the political scape of identity and postidentity politics and how can the public be reclaimed as a site of action.
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