Global Humanities: Borders and Borderlands

A core course in the Global Humanities, Borders and Borderlands is concerned with the messiness of being human – with the languages and heritages that are tangled together in human communities and traditions – and with the borders, figurative and literal, that apportion this complexity into more limiting categories. Its focus is the lived diversity of human experience and those communities that do not fit within neatly drawn lines and boundaries. The course defines borderlands broadly, both in the sense of contexts in which local actors negotiate mixed heritages, lose hold of their own traditions, or creatively reinvent them, and in the sense of individuals or traditions that straddle distinct cultural worlds. The course is equally interested in relations of power, examining the self/other contrasts that draw clear distinctions among blurred communities as well as exploring those moments in which imperial actors appropriate indigenous traditions or lose hold of their own heritages in contact with native realities. It is concerned with zones of cultural interaction – with the mutual influences, imitations, and changes that define enmeshed traditions – and with processes of erasure and destruction. The disciplines of the humanities allow us to examine the varied artifacts of these interactions and the forms of expression they create or make impossible. They also help us gauge the effects of these cultural interrelationships across time and space and to comparatively explore distinct, indeterminate contexts. Examining the uncertain lines that demarcate peoples and traditions, the course will assist students in navigating a present marked by migrations and cultural mixings and in which global and indigenous heritages are folded together or layered one on top of the other.

This network course includes an online section that is open to enrollment to GHEA21 students across the network. Please visit the GHEA21 Online Courses for further information.

This course counts towards the Global Humanities certificate.