The Disinherited: A Literary Survey

“I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.” With this infamous line James Weldon Johnson concludes The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and compares the plight of white passing Black Americans to ‘the disinherited” brother from the book of Genesis, Esau. It is one of the most famous lines in American literary history and it has troubled critics for decades. What exactly has Johnson's unnamed narrator sold? What has he lost? And why has he—in the words of Patricia J. Williams—claimed for himself "a heritage the weft of whose genesis is his own disinheritance"?

This class makes a case for ‘the disinherited” as a pivotal, yet frequently overlooked, idea, within literary history. Reading across ancient Greek tragedy, the Hebrew Bible, Arthurian romance, early modern drama, nineteenth century anarchist zines, social realist novels, and contemporary fiction, we will explore how the idea of “the disinherited” raises profoundly troubling questions over belonging, property, kinship, race, loss, ownership, and reparations. Drawing primarily on fictional works, we will explore the intellectual biography and cultural history of this vexed category, as well as considering its contemporary potential for formulating demands for reparations, redress, and redistributive justice in the present.

Historically “the disinherited” has connoted a class of undesirables: the bastards, the "black sheep," and the banished. As such, we will treat the category of “the disinherited” as offering vital new perspectives on reproduction, and the intergenerational legacies, of race, sex and class-based dispossession. Along the way we will meet those marked by their unbelonging: treacherous brothers, goddesses of vengeance, single mothers, queers, sex workers, cannibals responsible for parricide, ragged revolutionaries, and women bearing the scars of their enslaved ancestors. Through short writing assignments and in-class presentations, students will explore how these fictional representations of disinheritance are enlisted in a wider set of critical conversations about the intergenerational effects of slavery, settler colonialism, and empire.

Course Readings include, but are not limited to: Genesis (~500 BCE), The Oresteia (458 BCE), Moriaen (~1250), King Lear (1605) Evelina (1778), Melmoth the Wanderer (1821), The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Disinherited: The Lost Birthright of the American Indian (1960), The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile (1972), Corregidora (1975), Sweet Diamond Dust (1989), The Inheritance of Loss (2004).

Reclaiming that from which one has been disinherited is a good thing . . . Yet claiming for myself a heritage the weft of whose genesis is my own disinheritance is a profoundly troubling paradox

— Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights

What Is Your One Demand?

An Introduction to Feminist Theory

Ni una mujer menos, ni una muerte mas (not one woman less, not one more death)

— #NiUnaMenos

This seminar introduces students to the history of transnational, anti-racist, and indigenous feminist movements in the Americas through a survey of different feminist demands. Taking seriously the claims that (1) politics is about demands, not values, and (2) feminism is a political agenda, not an identity, students will explore the allegiances, intersections, and genealogies that emerge once we treat feminism as a complex and conflicted history of collective action and advocacy. Over the course of the semester, we will move between anti-lynching campaigns to Black Lives Matter to prison abolition; from Wages for Housework to demands for Universal Basic Income to debt abolition; from free school meals to free childcare to free schooling; and from free abortion access to free hormones to universal healthcare.

Centering the perspective of criminalized and persecuted persons we will work together to ask: What is the role of feminism in challenging power and making demands in service of change? How do expansive critiques of state violence shape feminist views on the state, institutions, and society more broadly? What is the relationship between structural violence and individual harm? Who—or perhaps more importantly what—should we make demands of? And, of course . . . What is your one demand?

Readings will include a selection of feminist literature, theory, and manifestos. No prerequisites required.

The Inheritance Plot

What do you think is a better investment: Going to law school or marrying rich? “Work or Inheritance?”

For those curious to know the answer to this "key question" the economist Thomas Piketty has one clear piece of advice. You should read the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac.

In this seminar we will take Piketty at his word, treating this instruction as an invitation to explore how contemporary anglophone fiction rewrites the plots of 19th century realist fiction to expose the workings of 21st century capitalism. Reading and watching hit TV shows such as Succession and The Gentleman, and novels by Helen Oyeyemi, Thomas Berhard, Orphan Pamuk, and Hernan Diaz, alongside key works in political economy, we will consider what contemporary literature and culture teaches its readers, true or otherwise, about economics, finance, and families.