JUNIOR SEMINAR: The Art of Resistance

This writing intensive seminar explores everyday forms of resistance under conditions of extreme oppression—contexts in which fear of persecution drives political and moral agency underground. To examine concealment and deception as modes of resistance, we will draw from various genres, including academic monographs, memoirs, and fiction. To fully understand the idea of resistance, ranging from obscuring one’s preferences to wearing a mask, we will consider what each author believed should be resisted, why it should be resisted, and how they argued it should be resisted. Though important, we will not be studying heroic, openly defiant forms of resistance—such as revolutions, rebellions, and mass protests—but instead ask: How might I resist when the price of defiance is deportation, imprisonment, or even death? Resistance under such extreme conditions, particularly authoritarianism, requires rethinking the relationship between visibility and virtue, conscience and circumstance, defiance and dignity, deception and duty. To glimpse the tragic realism that often follows, we will read works by Herman Melville, Primo Levi, Toni Morrison, Leo Strauss, Nella Larsen, James Scott, Erving Goffman, Albert Hirschman, Timur Kuran, Václav Havel, Czesław Miłosz, and Gloria Anzaldúa, among others.

Junior seminars fulfill upper division requirements for the major.

Subfield:   Political Theory