History of Consciousness
HISC 5 Time Travel and the Law
Examines how law, history, and speculative fiction shape what we know—and don’t know— about race, gender, and power. Reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred alongside legal texts and archival theory, course uncovers how archives marginalize and erase the lives and personhood status of systematically oppressed people. Drawing from alternative historical methods like Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, students explore how scholarship can both reimagine missing stories and challenge dominant narratives of memory and agency without reproducing historic violence.