Nudos y enredos: revistas andinas del siglo XX

Indigenous Stories of Hydro Power in Quebec and BC

Meryl McMaster, Time's Gravity 2015 (source: gallerieswest.ca)

This course meets the Place and Power requirement. 

This course explores how Indigenous writers, filmmakers and artists in Quebec and BC engage with the impact of hydro development on their lands. Through the example of a local case and a cross-country one, we will examine how hydro, often perceived as a form of sustainable energy, is also an extractive industry that has participated in the historical and ongoing process of separating Indigenous peoples from their lands. We will put the local case of hydro in BC in dialogue with hydro power in Quebec, a province where hydro development is connected to the Québécois national project and where water symbolizes the resource that led to the province’s economic emancipation. Through the study of life-writing, testimony, autofiction and dystopian fiction, we will explore the themes of relationship to land, culture and kin, and interrogate the dynamics that govern our current extractivist and colonialist systems of exploitation and power. Students will engage with literary texts from a variety of genres, as well as cinema and visual art to analyze the themes, arguments, rhetorical and visual devices put forward by creators. Students will gain an understanding of a timely issue at work in Quebec and BC.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Restricted to Faculty of Arts students.

Arts narratifs autochtones au Québec

Depuis le début des années 2000, les arts narratifs autochtones au Québec connaissent un essor important. Dans leurs textes littéraires et œuvres cinématographiques, les créatrices et créateurs issus des Premiers Peuples mettent en avant des demandes de justice, de guérison et de récupération des savoirs autochtones. Si notre époque actuelle continue d’être marquée par le colonialisme de peuplement, la création et l’art de raconter (le storytelling), peuvent-ils constituer des interventions qui dérangent les systèmes qui oppriment ? Pour bien y répondre, nous nous pencherons sur les débats historiques et contemporains sur la langue, la race, la souveraineté et l’exploitation des ressources naturelles au Québec, afin de contextualiser la production des arts narratifs autochtones et de mieux comprendre les épistémologies qui les sous-tendent. La sélection d’œuvres d’écrivain.es et de cinéastes de différentes nations (Innu, Wendat, Cris, Mohawk, Abénaquis, Anishnaabe et Inuit), qui s’expriment dans différents genres littéraires (histoire orale, récit de vie, autofiction, théâtre, nouvelle, poésie) et cinématographiques (archives visuelles, documentaire, long métrage, court métrage, nouveaux médias), mettra en lumière la grande diversité des arts narratifs autochtones au Québec. Nos discussions seront ancrées dans des méthodologies de recherche autochtones et nous accorderont une attention particulière aux questions de la positionnalité et des stratégies d’engagement éthique avec les textes.

Language of instruction: French

Instructor: Isabella Huberman

Think Like a Forest: A Dialogue Between Premodern Worldviews, Environmental Humanities, and Indigenous Knowledges

Guillaume de Machaut: Poetical Works 1350-55 Manuscript (Ms. français 1586), 300 x 210 mm (folio size) Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (https://www.wga.hu/html_m/zgothic/miniatur/1351-400/1french/french15.html)

How do we think? Are we aware of the kind of thinking we entertain? What kind of world do our individual and collective, conscious or unconscious thought-processes generate? Do we even have a choice in the orientation of our thinking patterns, and if we do, does it matter to know we can choose how to think?

Recent scientific research on plants and forests has shown that plants are dynamic, ever-evolving creatures that know how simultaneously to respond to their own inner pattern while remaining adaptive to the environment; beings that know how to grow in resilience and flexibility by developing a vast web of relations, both visible and invisible. In becoming who they are, plants also generate and foster complex ecosystems around them: they support communities of deeply interconnected yet also wildly diverse living species, including our own. In other words: plants have developed the ability to foster life, by giving to their environment more than what they take from it for their sustenance. Without plants and their way of being, we humans would simply not exist.

At the same time, anthropology has taken a new turn since accepting the hypothesis that our way of relating to the “other-than-“, or “more-than-”, human ways of being can change dramatically if we relinquish the claim that thinking is a function uniquely pertaining to the human brain. How do we re-attune ourselves to a thinking-living planet, and possibly to a thinking-living cosmos?

Somewhat like an old-growth forest, pre-modern Europe produced a vast corpus of texts and images that mirror and teach an organic way of thinking and of becoming. In this course we will deepen our understanding of these expressions of ecologically-oriented, transformative worldviews. Our approach will be complemented and supported by select readings in contemporary environmental humanities, and in (mostly) North-American Indigenous perspectives on education as path to wholeness.

We will discuss:

• The Romance of the Rose (excerpts); Tristan and Isolde; The Grail Legend (excerpts);
• Lady Philosophy and/as Mother Nature embodying feminine wisdom from Antiquity to the 
Middle Ages;
• St Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante Alighieri;
• Botticelli’s mythological paintings; Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and other paintings;

Montaigne’s education of the mind through rootedness in the body and the heart.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Recommendation: Second-year standing or higher.

Italian Food Cultures

Cross-listed with ITAL380

Italy is world-renowned for its food cultures and Italians put great care into food preparation, consumption, and appreciation. It’s no wonder that Italian food-related themes permeate the country’s cultural life and beyond. This course examines cultural representations of Italian or Italian-derived foods and the role that they play in articulating larger social issues in contemporary Italy, including regionalism, anti-globalization, family history, gender and sexual identities, Italian American food, tourism in Italy, and immigration to Italy. Through studying primary texts such as films and literature, students are encouraged to form a complex picture of Italy’s relationships with food cultures in a global context. Oral presentations, as well as a final project (in the format of a critical essay, a short film, a multimedia project, or creative writing), are the main tools of assessment of learning outcomes. Participation in seminar-style, group discussions in class is essential to developing critical and analytical skills for these assessment activities. The course assumes no prior knowledge of Italian. But it requires a passion for Italian food and culture!

The course is particularly recommended to students at 2^nd year standing or higher.

Language of instruction: English

Prerequisites: No prerequisites