CL/CSDS 8910, section 004, meeting Wednesday evenings, “ We are All Americans: Re-Imagining America in a Post-9/11 World" taught by Visiting Professor Jaap Kooijman from the University of Amsterdam.
CL/CSDS 8910
CL/CSDS 8910, section 004, meeting Wednesday evenings, “ We are All Americans: Re-Imagining America in a Post-9/11 World" taught by Visiting Professor Jaap Kooijman from the University of Amsterdam:
“Nous sommes tous américains� declared the French newspaper Le Monde after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For a short moment, we were all Americans. This seminar examines how “America� has been depicted in global popular culture, both produced in the USA as well as in other parts of the world, including film, television, art, and pop music. A clear distinction will be made between an imagined “America� and the nation-state USA. In the USA, 9/11 has been used as a critical point in time to rethink American national identity, often based on a rigid “us� versus “them� paradigm. Using recent texts written by, among others, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen Habermas, W.J.T. Mitchell, Lynn Spigel, and Slavoj ®i¾ek, we will discuss how 9/11 functions in the re-imagining of “America� both within and outside of the USA.
Literature:
- Reader
- Jean Baudrillard, America, translated by Chris Turner, London and New York: Verso, 1988.
- Jaap Kooijman, Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008.
For more information, see Professor Kooijman’s homepage:
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/j.w.kooijman/page3.html
