Aftermath: Literature of Reparation, Redress, Refusal and Change
Cross-Listed with the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and the Department of English Language and Literature

"In a discussion on this subject Miss Searle pointed out that the child’s impulse to restore things is also hindered by its early experience of the fact that it is easy to break things but exceedingly difficult to put them together again. Factual evidence of this kind must, I think, contribute to increase its doubts about its creative powers."

— Melanie Klein, “Obsessional Neurosis and Super Ego” The Psycho-Analysis of Children, 1932. Footnote, 240.

What does it mean to address oneself to, or attempt to repair, legacies of violence and harm? What theories, resources, and models of personal, psychoanalytic, legal, political repair are available, and what kinds of possibilities do they enable? Is repair even a possibility, or a useful framework, for change? This course tracks the question of repair through contemporary conversations and historical case studies. Reading works by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Saidiya Hartman, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, we will track how the concept of repair and reparation has motivated political action, activism, economic decision-making, artistic creativity and interpersonal ritual. We will read poems, engage performances, and consider other rituals of repair, breaking, and re-making. In addition, we will read literary and activist material pertinent to historical movements for reparations, including works from the Redress Movement for Japanese Internment in Canada and the United States, ongoing projects of the repatriation of Indigenous remains and cultural materials in museums, and transformative justice models of conflict resolution.


Students will be able to:

Articulate a variety of theoretical stances and employ a variety of methodologies to consider reparative projects and modes of redress and conflict resolution in society and in their own life experiences.

Use close reading tools to analyze how power, identity, race, indigeneity, and difference operate and articulate themselves in discourses of repair across a variety of genres of text and objects, and craft arguments about how those discourses function.

Take risks, experiment, and pose creative and critical questions about course texts in collaborative and collegial dialogue—written and spoken—with peers.