2021-2022 HTDTWT seminar Ana Teixeira Pinto: Love is the answer! What is the question?
About Ana Teixeira Pinto
The seminar from month to month
Participants: Maxima Smith, Mara Ittel, Cristina Emmel, Elisa Giuliano, Felix Bahret, Izaro Ieregi González, João Polido Gomes, Afrang Nordlöff Malekian.
INTRODUCTION:
In the 2016 documentary Vers la Tendresse by filmmaker Alice Diop, one of the film’s young interviewees, prompted to discuss affection and intimacy, retorts: “love is for white people.”
In her 2008 book The Female Complaint, recently deceased affect theorist Lauren Berlant argued that though women are often disappointed by lived intimacy they blame “flawed men,” rather than divest from romantic fantasy. Love, Berlant sustains, is “the gift that keeps on taking.”
In our 2021/22 seminar we will examine the structuring force of “love” in the racial and gender ordering of the social, by surveying the promise of undying love, romantic heroines, histories of shame and stigma, the colonial origins of modern sexuality, the nexus between semiotics and the somatic, insolvent desires, aesthetic categories, paraphilias, vampires, and the quest for eternal life.
Preliminary Bibliography:
Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
bell hooks, All About Love. William Morrow Paperbacks, 2018.
Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: a Sociological Explanation. Cambridge: Polity, 2015.
David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
Durba Mitra, Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015
Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.
Meg Armstrong, “The Effects of Blackness: Gender, Race, and The Sublime in Aesthetic Theories of Burke and Kant,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54, no. 3, (1996).
Donna V. Jones, “Inheritance and Finitude: Toward a Literary Phenomenology of Time,” ELH 85, no. 2 (2018).
David Marriott, “On Racial Fetishism,” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 18, no. 2 (2010).
Rei Terada, “Hegel’s Racism for Radicals,” Radical Philosophy 2, nr. 5 (2019).