This 5-Week course will map out the role of the refusal of work in American working class history.
This course will map out the role of the refusal of work in American working class history. We will focus especially on its Irish rebel roots, and its implications for questions of identity, class power, and radical strategy today. Over five sessions, the group will consider four related themes:
Session 1: Theoretical introduction: the refusal of work
Session 2: Sabotage and industrial unionism
Session 3: Culture, counterculture, and worker power
Session 4: Anti-imperialism and refusal
Session 5: Collective project work and presentations
In addition to doing readings and participating in conversations, course comrades will work together to produce a piece of creative digital scholarship that uses the radical imagination to consider and to broadcast the political themes of the course in film and text. Specific outlines and roles of the collective project to be determined by the group.
Excerpts from the following texts will be circulated before the sessions in which they are discussed:
(Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals), (LaFargue, The Right to be Lazy), (Marcuse, Eros and Civilization), (Negri, Marx Beyond Marx), (Davis, The Stopwatch and the Wooden Shoe), (Flynn, Sabotage), (Lens, The Labor Wars), (Terkel, Working), (Negt and Kluge, History and Obstinacy), (Rosemont, The Rise and Fall of the Dil Pickle), (Brundage, From Bughouse Square to the Beat Generation), (Rosemont, Joe Hill and the Making of a Revolutionary Counterculture), (Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism), (Said, Yeats and Decolonization), (Robinson, Black Marxism), (Marx, On the Irish Question), (Connolly, Labour in Irish History), (Moten, In the Break)
Sean O'Donohue:
Kristin Lawler:
Julian Chehirian & Kristin Lawler:
Bryan McTiernan:
