Replete with athletic bodies, monumental prospects, and incessant callbacks to the idealized past, fascist cultural production is often seen as conservative, derivative, kitschy, or transparently propagandistic—in short, bad. Yet, its effectiveness in mobilizing the masses by rewiring the affective, ideological, and libidinal economy of capitalist modernity cannot be denied. How, then, do fascist aesthetics work? ...

“Lesbians are not women,” the feminist theorist Monique Wittig famously pronounced. But what did she mean? According to Wittig’s theory, sexual difference is an ideology, not an ontological given. The relationship of woman to man is one of domination, determined as much by material and economic oppression as language and discourse. In other words, “there is no sex. Only sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses.” By existing outside of heterosexuality, lesbians refuse the category of “woman” and break its ontological illusion of timeless difference: what Wittig calls the “heterosexual contract.” How, with Wittig, can we understand the possibilities of a feminism that seeks to abolish sex? ...

Søren Kierkegaard—Hamlet’s equally melancholic Danish counterpart—is frequently regarded as the father of existentialism for his exploration of concepts such as subjectivity, anxiety, and absurdity. This course will be an introduction to the main ideas of the nineteenth-century philosopher and theologian. How did Kierkegaard—through puzzles, pseudonyms, and ruminations on mysteries—challenge and in turn influence systemic philosophy? What is the appeal of existentialism today? ...

The Black Panther Party was one of the most influential social movements of the 20th century, as well as one of the most mythologized and misunderstood. At its height, the Black Panther Party had 68 chapters in the U.S., an international branch in Algeria, and was a coalition partner to political organizations in six continents. The Party’s open defiance of state actors, as well as its campaigns against U.S. imperialism, made it the target of vicious state repression—both physical and psychological. At the same time, the movement itself was riven by schisms and the dynamics of interpersonal conflict and violence. What is the legacy of the Black Panther Party? What, as a social movement and as a strategy of radical politics, were the Party’s strengths and weaknesses, its potentialities and limits? ...

The Mexican Revolution was like a crucible—once heated, it radically transformed everything it touched and reshaped Mexico for a century. Aspiring initially to the liberal reform of the 35-year dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, the movement quickly gave way to something more radical: the demand for land, indigenous rights, and even grassroots communal power. If 19th-century Latin America politics was fundamentally about independence, and the 20th century about socialism, what are we to make of this crucial but often overlooked interlude, before Cuba, and before even Russia, where socialist demands were being worked out in practice and in a political language not yet fully born? Standing at the threshold between past and present, at the borderlands of the First World and the Third, what can the Mexican Revolution teach us about not only Mexico, but also about revolutionary change more broadly? ...