Territory and Affect

This graduate seminar will examine theories on territory, and their relation to affective constructs regarding social bodies, race, gender, sexuality, and religious acts. We will examine a number of issues related to spatial theory, affect theory, and performance. We will study the constructions of territory, affect, and performances of race and gender as historically and geographically situated phenomena. How are territory and affect racialized or gendered? What can affect theory bring to the geographical imagination, and how do geopolitical fantasies shape imaginaries of distance, nearness, foreignness, and self? We will engage a comparative lens and examine these issues across processes of globalization, migration, cultural production and circulation, and infrastructural changes of cartographic constructs such as East/West, Transpacific, circum-Altantic, and the Global South.