Class name: “Visual Politics of Bondage”
Taught by: Visiting Assistant Professor of English Reema Rajbanshi
Here’s what Rajbanshi has to say about her course:
This course reads texts addressing what is broadly called “bondage”—chattel slavery, debt bondage, indenture, etc.—and focuses on questions of the archive, the body, and the complex uses of pleasure. We consider questions like which voices were included or not in the archive—and what is legible as an archive—and how the use of pleasure, under extreme conditions, might be both a symptom of subjection and an emancipatory tool. Because we focus on so much visual material outside the U.S., I always hope students learn to see their own and other worlds with greater clarity despite the “discomfort” of doing so and that they get an introduction to understudied histories that continue to have impact not only in Brazil and India but in their own (not-so-separate) world.
The course was suggested by my department, as an interdisciplinary course centering visuality, and I’ve learned a lot from putting it together as well as from student engagement with materials. My own research focuses more on 19th-century abolitionist texts across Brazil and British India, but the concerns with how categories of difference, such as race and caste, and liberalism’s elision of these were in fact crucial to propagating systems of bondage. Mostly, I would always want to offer a class that examines this very special category of labor, since it has not only such deep historical meaning for particular communities, such as Afro-Brazilians or Dalit-Bahujans, but crucially shapes our lives and inequality today, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
See what other courses the Department of English is offering this semester.
Image: Boston Citizens break up an Abolitionist meeting. Illustration by Harper’s Weekly (1938).
Cool Classes is a recurring series on the Haverblog that highlights interesting, unusual, and unique courses that enrich the Haverford College experience.