Coffee and Literature (Topics in Transnational Literature): This course takes a quotidian object—a cup of coffee—and examines a global story of beauty and grief, of pleasure and exploitation. We will learn the history, science, and economics behind coffee and use our knowledge as a basis to better understand literature and film that engages with coloniality, globalism, and the individual lives affected by this plant. This course asks the following questions: What do we learn about ourselves as people by examining our relationship to coffee? What do we learn about translation and transnational literature when we think of coffee’s relationship to colonization? How has literature been shaped by human interaction with coffee?
We will engage with the following books: Michael Pollan’s Caffeine, Dave Eggars’s The Monk of Mokha, Dany Laferrière’s An Aroma of Coffee, and Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness. We will also watch the following films: White Material (2009) by Claire Denis, Ixcanul (2015) by Jayro Bustamante, and Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) by Jim Jarmusch.
Civil Rights Movement (Topics in African American Studies): The civil rights movement, especially the black freedom struggle in the US South, was predominantly led by young students who wanted to change the world. Aside from the gains made in voting rights and civil rights legislation, they worked hard to create a more equitable society. In this course we will: 1. explore the civil rights movement as a grassroots movement led by young people ; 2.theorize about the relationship between storytelling and archival documents; 3. understand the role of art and creativity in the process of social change. We will achieve these objectives by: 1. focusing on the writings and art made by activists involved in the Movement; 2. working with archives and primary documents alongside Tom Dent’s travel memoir Southern Journey, in which he tells the stories of activists; and and 3. looking at the artistic production from activists and write responses about their role in the movement.
Queer of Color Writing and Critique: This graduate seminar at University of Iowa explores American twenty and twenty-first century authors who write from multiple intersecting identities and offer a necessary perspective to literary theory and cultural criticism. Our main fields of inquiry will be: intersectionality, queer of color critique, and critical race studies. We begin with pre-intersectionality writing from writers such as the Combahee River Collective, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Barbara Christian, Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga. Then we will read critical writing about intersectionality as well as queer of color critique to provide a framework with which to read writing by contemporary authors and poets such as Octavia Butler, Carmen Maria Machado, John Keene, Jewelle Gomez, Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Dawn Lundy Martin and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.
Topics in Postcolonial Studies: Revolutionary Caribbean, Cuba and Puerto Rico: This undergraduate course at University of Iowa looks at the legacy of Spanish colonialism and U.S. intervention in the Americas with a focus on Cuban and Puerto Rican literature, two islands that were strong allies during their 19th century movements against Spain. We will begin with the legacy of thinkers and writers from this time such as Jose Martí and Eugenio María de Hostos, and use this as a framework for other postcolonial thinkers of the Caribbean. Topics include: Spanish colonialism across the Americas, U.S. intervention, the cigar industry in Florida, the global anarchist movement, tropical gothic, indigenous voices, afrocubanismo, diaspora and migration. We will read main works of literature from Cuban and Puerto Rican authors, essayists, and poets, and finish the course with how contemporary authors and artists of the diaspora engage with the legacy of both Spanish and U.S. colonialism and imperialism. Main novels: Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa, Daughters of the Stone, Leonardo Padura, Havana Black, Yoss, A Planet for Rent with readings from Ramón Emeterio Betances, José Martí, Pedro Albizu Campos, Julia de Burgos, Reinaldo Arenas, Ana Lydia Vega, and others.
Reading and Writing Drama: Performance and Social Justice: This undergraduate course at the University of Iowa examines theater and performance that questioned convention and sought to change society. We will look at plays that set out to be disruptive and controversial, such as Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman, but also how certain plays have been taken up by social movements, such as Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot by civil rights and prison abolitionist activists and Euripides The Trojan Women by Syrian refugees in the UK. We will look at how performance impacts U.S. politics and activist culture, yet does so through a global framework that considers plays and movements outside the U.S. that have impacted and shaped this relationship, asking: What is the life of a play? When plays get adapted to different social movements in different area over time? We will also consider less formal forms of performance attached to social movements that push the boundaries of what a play can be.
Art and Activism: Civil Rights Movement to #BlackLivesMatter is my senior seminar taught at University of Pittsburgh. The course centers on the literature and art of 20th and 21st century social movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter, contemporary feminism, environmentalism, the struggle for gay rights, the prison abolition movement, and others in their historical contexts and through the perspective of art. How did art define and shape these movements? How does activism impact our culture?
In my open-level “Literature of the Americas” course, I’ve designed a research project with Pitt libraries that explores pre-Columbian, indigenous, and West-African derived cultures impacted by colonialism.
“Memory and Migration” is a graduate course at Pitt that asks: What happens to personal and cultural memory when people emigrate or are displaced from their homes? “Memory and Migration” looks at how transnational narratives of migration interrupt a nation-based political, cultural, and literary paradigm. We will examine a variety of texts through the theoretical frameworks of border studies and memory studies, in order to challenge the boundaries of these disciplines and “migrate” their knowledges beyond the southwest United States and discussions of Holocaust. Students will gain an overview of the field of memory studies and migration studies while examining two fields in transition: immigrant literature and ethnic studies. Part of my interest in literary study is a search for the inexpressible and the desire to eradicate nation-based literature through practice; how better to do this than through the opening question of the course description, and experience felt by so many more than the 65.3 million displaced people from different cultures and classes around the globe.
Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder 