Title-Seeing Eye to Eye: Intersubjectivity, Respect, and Recognition

The Latin respicere, which is the root for the word “respect,” means ‘to look back’ at another, yet many of us cannot respect each other simply by the refusal to meet each other’s eyes. In this course, we will begin by asking ourselves: What conditions allow for a mutual recognition of one’s subjective experiences by others? How is respect conveyed through interpersonal affectivites? How is one granted recognition in the dominant white supremicist patriarchal culture? What kind of labor does one have to perform in order to achieve respect and recognition? We will ground these questions in the theory of intersubjectivity, which has become an important domain of study within the fields of psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Intersubjectivity, quite simply, is the sharing of subjective experiences by two or more people. We will investigate how intersubjective bonds between people are formed, and how one is influenced by those with whom they form intersubjective relations—through their families, friendships, and love relationships. In particular, we will be studying the ethics surrounding these questions in relation to race, gender, religion, and nation. In order to do this, we will look at how various authors have portrayed the complexity of how our intersubjective bonds continually shape our identities. Thus, we will study the politics of assimilation, respectability, colonization, domination, and white supremicist culture in relation to the intersubjective commitments one makes to better understand how these big questions are interlaced within the deceptively “small” choices one makes over time. Possible texts we will read include: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Arundhuti Roy’s The God of Small Things, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake,  Shakespeare’s King Lear, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, James Baldwin’s Another Country, Jean Rhy’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Hegel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gayatri Spivak, Jessica Benjamin, Sara Ahmed, Homi Bhabha, Kant, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Satisfies Core Education Requirements:

• Areas of Inquiry: Arts & Letters (A&L)
• Cultural Literacy: Global Perspectives (GP)

Satisfies Gen- Education Requirements (students enrolled prior to Fall 2019):

• Group Satisfying: Arts & Letters (A&L)
• Multicultural: Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance (IP)