LCST2140

Using Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments as our point of departure, this class is a paean to lost girls, gender misfits, riotous women of color, working class artists, and genre outlaws. We will explore the themes of diaspora, wandering, the politics of brokenness, the meaning of moving through the world spontaneously, and the refusal to chart a conventional life course. Texts that will be assigned will include memoirs, experimental theory and autocriticism, novels, zines, and supplementary scholarly texts, many of which were written by people who were part of punk and underground subcultures. This reading-heavy course will include works by Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, Bhanu Kapil, Lisa Crystal Carver, McKenzie Wark, Chris Kraus, Jamaica Kincaid, Catherine Liu, Nat Raha, and others. [Track C]