Courses

In this course, we’ll explore the ambitions, challenges, and failures of globalization through the lens of castaway literature, with works spanning from the seventeenth century to the present. In today’s postindustrial economies, labor has been outsourced to other parts of the world, and we depend on global shipping networks to supply us with commodities and to relieve us of our massive outputs of waste. Manufactured goods, raw materials, trash, people, and nonhuman species all circulate the globe via container ships and shipping networks that we rarely consider when we purchase something at a local Target. This course moves back and forth between early modernity and the present to consider the wastes generated by global economic circuits. We’ll begin by locating the origins of the global capitalist imaginary in texts written by proponents of colonial exploration and expansion. We’ll then turn to the transatlantic slave trade and to the archives of the black Atlantic to investigate forms of racialized violence and anticolonial resistance in the history of finance capital in the Atlantic world. Finally, we’ll bring our observations to bear on the forms of globalization that sustain contemporary postindustrial economies: from the containerization of shipping to the uneven environmental harms endured by nonhuman ecosystems and the poor in the global South.