Marxist Materialisms: Change the World

Philosophers have only interpreted the world, wrote Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach: the point is to change it.   Perhaps this is the origin of theory.  In this seminar we will examine theories that both explain the world and help us change it, to make it more peaceable, sustainable, equal, and just.   

Our point of departure is therefore Marx and his understanding of equality rooted in economic justice.  We will familiarize ourselves with concepts such as capital and class consciousness, reification, commodification, totality, and alienation, and explore how they have been used to rethink literary and mass cultural forms and their ongoing transformations in a changing world system.   Other theorists may include J-J Rousseau, Sigmund Freud, Franz Fanon, Eric Williams, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Edward Said, Antonio Gramsci, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Gayatri Spivak, Vivek Chibber, Achille Mbebe, Kohei Saito, Giovanni Arrighi, Pascale Casanova, Slavov Zizek, and Melinda Cooper.   Seminar members are invited to bring examples from texts – poems, novels, art, film, media, and digital culture –that reveal, through their depictions of injustice, what justice might be.