Overview.  The purpose of this class is to provide a structured introduction to historical and theoretical concerns of relevance to the “Cultures of Circulation” working group at CCA for 2006-2007; to provide a broad sense of the variety these concerns have taken in various disciplines across the humanities and social sciences; and to put graduate students into contact with professors from fields outside their own specialty (at Rutgers and also at institutions nearby) who might eventually serve in formal or informal ways in aspects of their scholarship. 

Rationale.  Although by no means a new idea, “circulation” has developed in the last ten or fifteen years into one of the more important keywords in a number of different disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.  Something of an umbrella term, it has gained prominence for defining not so much a field (i.e. labor studies, cultural studies) as a process taken to be central to the long history of modernity.  As such, much of its usefulness comes from the ease with which it articulates any number of cross-disciplinary interests.  Circulation is key to explorations of migration, diaspora, globalization and cosmopolitanism; to interest in the exchange of commodities and the production, thereby, of new structures of affiliation; to flow, hybridity, and traveling cultures; to the effort of rethinking America in global terms; to the notion of world anglophone as a disciplinary substructure in literature; to geographies of the novel and art; and to a general return in many different disciplines to comparative approaches. 

I would suggest that the institutional prominence of circulation follows directly on the heals of the prominence of “culture.”  Circulation is what we do after we have gotten “beyond culture,” as any number of cultural theorists have been wanting to do.  As such, the CCA’s interest in forming a group to consider “cultures of circulation” — and not merely, say, the “circulation of culture,” or “circulation and culture” — is propitious and, not incidentally, enlivening; for it seems entirely fair to say that, accompanying the sense of urgency in attending to circulation as a matter global political significance, there is also a piquant aesthetic and intellectual pleasure that comes from bringing to light the workings of these strange, seemingly indeterminate, frequently avant-garde, and often surprisingly everyday networks.

As had been the case with culture, much of the energy generated around circulation as an index for cultural analysis has come from the frisson of competing definitions and claims made in its name.  This class will take a long historical view of this frisson, this definitional disconsensus, with an eye to understanding the different uses to which circulation is being put within and across the disciplines.   

Class Structure.  The class will be based on three kinds of activities.

1.  Reading.  We will survey key theoretical texts from the eighteenth century to the present in order to mark the ways that circulation and culture have given paradigmatic structure to for a variety of disciplines.  These will be arranged in units (i.e. “the gift,” “diffusion,” “culture and practical reason,” “space”), and will include readings from the likes of the following:  Herder, Marx, Benfey, Boas, Malinowski, Benjamin, Adorno, Elias, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Harvey, Lefebvre, Bourdieu, Sahlins, Silverstein, Anderson, Taylor and Appadurai.

Additionally, we will consider two or three literary texts, as yet to be determined, in order to provide a particular emphasis on theme of circulation in art, and on the object of art in circulation.  These might include Melville’s Moby Dick, Locke’s anthology The New Negro, or Carpentier’s The Lost Steps.

2.  Visits.  Invited scholars at Rutgers and from other institutions will join us for a discussion of pre-circulated papers.  I am particularly interested in inviting scholars who can contribute not only a theoretical perspective, but also an archive that we can use to work through the readings from above.  Some preliminary ideas about people who might be of interest include Thomas Bender, David Harvey, Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Franco Moretti, Marshal Sahlins, Fred Meyers, and Jim Clifford.  (***Please note that there is no guarantee that these people will be come—the schedule is very much in the works.***)

3.  Class Presentations.  At the end of the semester, students will be responsible for assembling and presenting an archive, a brief case study in a culture of circulation.