POLI1033 · Complex Problems and Enduring Questions

Shifting Forms: Political Belonging in Song and Film

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

Who is the we in a national hymn or a protest song? Times change, wills triumph, and imagined communities evolve. How do the arts specifically, song and film help define the "public" in a Republic? Likewise, how do the arts mediate the relation between individuals and minority communities, and the relation between those minority communities and the larger social world in which they take shape? Can examining artists specifically, writers and filmmakers and their relation to inherited aesthetic forms help one understand some of the complex negotiations (of feeling, of political conviction, of a sense of belonging) between individuals and larger-scale groupings? What if, for example, our sexualities are not simply confirmed or disparaged by aesthetic representations; what if they are also formed and determined by them? Tracing, on the one hand, the evolution of audio and visual representations of citizenship, political participation and the nation-state since the late 19th century, and, on the other, the film and literature of minority sexual cultures in the United States and Europe in roughly the same period, we will consider who and what makes it into national narratives and national identity in Europe and the United States, and some of the different relations between minority sexual cultures and mainstream and avant-garde practices of literature and film. Examining the relation between aesthetic forms and, on the one hand, changing political institutions, and, on the other, political and sexual identity and affiliation, the courses will lead participants to consider how political institutions and political culture are constantly reshaping one another, reflecting the shifting subjects of our political systems, and how literary texts and films shape the lives of those who read them.