Migrants, refugees, exiles: literature, visual culture, theory 4219-SH0037
How to think about the ongoing "migration crisis" and refugees? This class, first of all, provides theoretical foundations for understanding migration, refugees and exile. It allows you to become familiar with classic texts, as well as the latest works on critical refugee studies and critical race studies. Secondly, it shows how these theoretical inspirations combine or are complemented by contemporary literary texts and visual culture.
The class familiarizes students with critical texts from the 1940s, presenting them in a broader American historical and cultural context. Therefore, the discussion of Arendt's text is accompanied by a reading of Philip Roth's story about Jewish refugees in the USA from the 1950s, and a discussion of the series Transatlantic (2023) on a similar topic. In this way, theoretical texts become rooted in the debates of their times, and through juxtaposition with thematically related cultural texts, they gain a multiplicity of meanings. In a similar multidirectional way, issues related to the contemporary Mexican border in the USA, immigration to the USA from the Soviet Union, and immigration from South Asia will be addressed. An element of the classes will be the invitation to classes of guests or those who specialize in a given topic academically, artistically.
The class familiarizes students with the multitude of migratory/refugee national contexts and show the importance of literary and visual representations in shaping the field of thinking about refugees, exile and migration. The aim of the classes is also to critically analyze cultural texts in relation to the title concepts, thus preparing students to analyze the phenomena of contemporary culture.
Type of course
Mode
Course coordinators
Learning outcomes
Knowledge
Students are aware of/understand
P8S_WG.1 - theoretical foundations, general issues and selected specific issues appropriate for a given scientific or artistic discipline, including being able to revise the existing paradigms
P8S_WG.2 main development trends of scientific or artistic disciplines
P8S_WG.3 methodology of scientific research
Skills
Students can
P8S_UW.1 use knowledge from various fields of science or art to identify, formulate, and solve complex problems in innovative ways or perform research tasks, in particular:
- define the purpose and subject of research, formulate a research hypothesis,
- develop research methods, techniques and tools and use them creatively,
- form conclusions on the basis of the results of scientific research
P8S_UK.1 communicate on specialist topics and actively participate in the international scientific environment
P8S_UK.4 participate in the scientific discourse
P8S_UK.5 use a foreign language at the B2 level of the European Educational Description System to a degree enabling participation in the international scientific and professional environment
Social competence
P8S_KK.3 recognition of the importance of knowledge in solving cognitive and practical problems
P8S_KR.1 maintaining and developing the ethos of academic and creative communities, including:
- conducting scientific activities in an independent manner,
- respecting the principle of public ownership of the results of scientific activity, taking into account the principles of intellectual property protection
Assessment criteria
Active participation
Leading a discussion regarding a literary/visual text
Final project
2 absences are allowed
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Jewish Writings. New York: Schocken, 2008.
Burgett, Bruce, and Glenn Hendler, eds. Keywords for American Cultural Studies. New York: NYU Press, 2020.
Bui, Thi. The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. New York: Abrams Books, 2017.
De León, Jason. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.
Dubar-Ortiz, Roxanna, Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler, Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021
Herrera, Yuri. Signs Preceding the End of the World. Sheffield: And Other Stories, 2015.
Krasuska, Karolina. Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2024.
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. The New Immigrant Whiteness: Race, Neoliberalism, and Post-Soviet Migration to the United States. New York: NYU Press, 2018.
Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays. New York: Granta Books, 2013.
Schlund-Vials, Cathy J. "The subjects of 1975: Delineating the necessity of critical refugee studies." MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 41, no. 3 (2016): 199-203.
Ulinich, Anya. Petropolis. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: