Dreams and Nightmare: Shapes and Shadows in Theory
This cluster investigates dreams and nightmares as embodied sites of social struggle: where we are both haunted by the otherwise unrepresentable residue of historical and contemporary trauma, colonialism, and violence, but where we also workshop and experiment with alternatives. Informed by the Black feminist tradition and the Queer of Color critique, we ask how dreams and nightmares alike rearrange our senses of time, memory, place, space, self, story, and possibility. These modes challenge Eurocentric epistemic and ontological traditions while offering vital frameworks to make new senses of reality. Our work, inside and outside the academy, converges around questions of race, queerness, and cultural production; here, we promote the multisensory and polysemic ways dreamers envision and make new worlds.
We thus hold creative practice up against theory as a pedagogical mode: we wish to integrate students’ reflexes towards imagination, creativity, inquiry, and critique into unified learning goals. This cluster advances creation–informed, inspired, and in response to critical and challenging ideas–as radical praxis: a process of drafting dreams and imaginations into material action. To this end, these courses are organized around workshop models that ask students to explore a creative project supported by class readings, critical inquiry, and close and encouraging feedback. Supporting students through this process with activities that culminate in an original work, we aim to cultivate more incisive and brave questions, creative and intellectual risk-taking, and classroom communities that prioritize care and growth.
Description of Proposed Courses
Winter 2024
Shadow Work: A Reading Practice to Engage in Unknown Otherworldly Aesthetics (Frantece)
What is a shadow, and what does it mean to work with it? Shadow work has its roots in psychoanalytic theory, especially in the works of Lacan and Jung. However, in this course, we will take up more contemporary and occultic means of engaging with the shadow. Moreover, students will practice close reading and analyzing Black speculative texts— literature, art, and criticism— to understand the darkness that is present by reading into moments that lack clarity and produce fear. Shadow work is a reading practice that acknowledges the unknown and secrets within a work and a way to commune with the unknowns. The reading practice is primarily inspired by scholarly conversations of ecstasy. Shadow work involves an imaginative, spiritual, metaphysical, and sensational experience that removes parts of a person’s being from the material realm and moves toward an elusive place within the unknowns. Students will read into places that metaphorically and figuratively represent underworlds, to understand why a cultural producer would need to imagine a sort of darkness that is off-limits. For theories, we will read several works in the field of spirituality, Black pessimism, horror, fugitivity, and ecstasy. We will read works by Octavia Butler, Eve Ewing, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Throughout the course, students will engage in peer review to workshop multimodal projects in response to the readings.
Dream Work: Aspiration, Artistry, and Agency & the End(s) of Capital (Chan)
We’ll track the ubiquitous figure of the creator–be it the artist, author, activist, or casual social media user–as a worker who is transformed by technology, creativity, and social struggle. What does dream work (the formal and informal aesthetic labor of transposing dreams into reality) reveal about our desires, aspirations, agency and the material conditions of contemporary capitalism? What are the politics and perils of rendering the psychic content of our dreams and nightmares into textual or multisensory content? And how do we re-imagine our own life’s work (broadly defined) so that it aligns with the worlds of which we dream? This course is organized around a quarter-long creative project: we’ll design, workshop, and debut multimodal artifacts of our own making. We’ll scaffold this week-to-week by writing and sharing our own auto-ethnographic memos about the process: how we activate daydreams, grapple with the frictions of artistry, and celebrate creativity in community. We’ll support this with texts by creators and critics from queer, feminist, BIPOC, diasporic, and disability perspectives to to complicate our thinking on the dangerous and delicate work of dreaming.
Spring 2024
Black Speculative Fiction through Black Feminist and Queer theories: The Crafting of Elsewhere (Frantece)
In this course, we consider how Black speculative fiction allows us to be meditative of alternative ways of existing so that we can experience a reality that may not be like any pre-existing one. We will work with Black feminist methods of world and community building, as methods of finding life, love, kinship, and care and with queer theory’s experimenting and playing with reality, relationality, and time. Both fields articulate the persistence of anti-Blackness and heteronormativity but also articulate that there is a need to develop new modes of knowledge production, transforming the way we think about time, relationality, space/place, and imagination. How can a critical study of speculative fiction lead us to the ecstatic engagement of material conditions existing elsewhere? We will center our discussion around short texts: the poetry of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan; the art work of Cauleen Smith and Wangechi Mutu; and short stories by Octavia Butler and NK Jemisin. The writers, artists, and filmmakers we interrogate distort, disrupt, and destroy our material realities to bring us to another place that comes off as obscure, irrational, impossible, and nonsensical. Throughout the course, students will workshop multimodal projects in response to the readings.
The Unconscious, Online: Dreaming with(out) Algorithms (Chan)
Therapy chatbots, uncannily targeted advertising, and the algorithmic extraction of our most subliminal data: this course asks how psychoanalytic logics of the unconscious mind cryptically haunt our devices, platforms, and network technologies–and how these animate our nightmares and dystopian visions of the future. Perhaps more importantly: we’ll also use these discussions to identify opportunities for justice, subversion, and free play through technology. We’ll approach texts from cultural studies, critical design, STS, and Black feminist, postcolonial, and queer critiques–alongside histories of psychoanalytic thought and its deployments in contexts across time and space. We’ll observe how artists, hackers, critics, and everyday users across intersectional axes speak back to algorithmic apparatuses as a challenge to automated discrimination, hegemonic arrangements, Big Tech’s logics of extraction, and the encroaching and unequal digital surveillance and manipulation of our bodies, affects, and desires. We’ll ground our discussions by workshopping our own quarter-long media projects and (auto)ethnographically observing the places our dreams and nightmares interface with algorithms, databases, and the world writ large.
Biographies of Applicants
Christopher Santo Domingo Chan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, a video artist, and writer for public radio. His dissertation work is an ethnographic account of creators of color navigating the whims of the attention economy within a viral video startup. He has developed courses in the departments of Anthropology (Anth. of Popular Culture), English (Critical Literacy in the Natural Sciences), and CHID (480, Capitalism and the Senses) and published pedagogical resources for classroom educators through McSweeney’s; his visual work has also been exhibited at the Wing Luke Museum and the Museum of the Moving Image.
Brittney Frantece is a writer, artist, educator, curator, and Ph.D. candidate at University of Washington (UW). Her dissertation specializes in Black speculative literary and visual arts. She explores this archive to examine the new ways of thinking, being, and knowledge productions Black imaginations offer. She has conducted workshops and courses for UW’s English and American Ethnic Studies departments, Seattle Community Colleges’s English department, The Northwest School, and the Henry Art Gallery. Her writing has appeared in Variable West, Black Embodiments Studios Journals, Hawai‘i Review chapbooks, and various art writing collections. She curated Black Invention in 3 Parts (2023) at Soil Art Gallery, Portraits of Ecstatic Feeling: Al Smith Collection (2022) for MOHAI and Queer Imaginations (2021) at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery in Seattle.
2023-24 Academic Year Plan and Supporting Activities
With Frantece’s artistic and curatorial experiences and Chan’s background in new media production/publishing, this cluster culminates in a public exhibition of students’ intellectual and creative work. Both of us will mentor students’ multimodal and multisensory projects in response to our courses’ materials, as well as guide students through the collaborative effort of creating works that speak to each other within a cohesive exhibition. To model our ethics toward community engagement and public scholarship, we will draft exhibition proposals for galleries off-campus, like Soil Art Gallery, Museums of Museums, METHOD, and Vermillion. We have relationships at the Henry, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and the Burke Museum as well. Inspired by the cluster theme, we will also organize a pedagogy workshop for students and faculty across campus; inspired and informed by our classroom experiences by our proposed methods of shadow work and dream work, this workshop will discuss the practical and pedagogical considerations for supporting creative student work, engaging affective and embodied experience in learning activities, and identifying opportunities to transgress Eurocentric conceptions of the mind and body through non-logocentric projects. We will engage local art galleries, libraries, and campus departments (listed below) with visits, trips, and activities that offer students connections between the courses’ themes and rotating exhibitions–allowing students to see diverse possibilities for articulating their ideas, and serving as material inspiration for their contribution to the upcoming exhibition.
Potential Connections to UW Faculty, Courses, and Programs
People: Mal Ahern, Rick Bonus, Nina Bozicnik, Rachel Chapman, Stephanie Clare, Jenna Grant,
Habiba Ibrahim, Elisheba Johnson (Wa Na Wari), Stephanie Johnson-Toliver (Black Heritage
Society), Jasmine Mahmoud, Deborah Porter, Chandan Reddy, Ileana Rodriguez-Silva, Rob
Rhee, Daniela Rosner, Phillip Thurtle, Sasha Su-Ling Welland
Departments, Units: American Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, Art, Cinema and Media Studies,
Communication, DXARTS, English, HCDE, Information School, Urban Design and Planning;
The Burke Museum, The Jacob Lawrence Gallery, and The Henry Museum