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Reading Questions for your Small Group WorkThe purpose of the small groups is for you to do the preliminary work of comprehension and discussion so that we can realistically discuss two days worth of class material in one class period. The questions that follow are intended as helpful taking off points for our small groups discussion. Your group will earn discussion points from the quality of your discussion – and that can correspond to working your way through specific questions, but it need not: that is, if one of your members comes up with a thought or insight or question or critique or dissent or even just dissatisfaction which is not a tangent or opinionated idiosyncrasy but which actually furthers your understanding of the power – negative and positive – of apocalyptic imagination – go for it (even if that means you do not use your time answering each question below). In short: the questions are intended as springboards (because it is easier to start talking on a substantive level if you have something to bounce off of). If the questions feel rote rather than stimulating your thought, ditch them and innovate! IF you spend the entire discussion period on one question, no problem. WEEK TWO Revelation, chapters 7-16. [Primary text]. I do not expect you to understand this text (who does?). Frankly, if you are familiar with the book of Revelation, you might not want even to re-read it. But if you have never read Revelation (which is the case for most of us), you need to have some idea of the kind of text this is.Adela Collins, "The Power of Apocalyptic Rhetoric -- Catharsis" in Crisis & Catharsis (Phila: Westminster Press, 1984), 141-163 [Biblical studies]Collins is looking at why the original communities that told Revelation to themselves did so – how Revelation functioned for them. Be clear on this: its narrative techniques, her notion of catharsis and projection, and its relation to historical context. And you want to start thinking about how this original way of reading Revelation is similar/ different from that of the Branch Davidians. All six episodes of Waco, directed by Drew Dowdle and John Erik Dowdle, 2018. Available on multiple streaming services: here is a link that coordinates them and you can pick the service of your choice.WEEK THREE:James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher, Why Waco? Cults and the Battle for Religious Freedom in America (Berkeley: Univ of CA, 1995), 1-79 [Religious Studies]. Main themes for discussion: A) When this group uses the word Messiah, Lamb of God, angel, explain the seven seals – they mean very different things than mainstream Christians. Who does this group think Koresh is? What do they think the Branch Davidians are? Who do they think Koresh’s biological children are?B) Whenever you try to understand a different group’s way of orienting around religion, it helps to put them in historical context. Who are the Seventh Day Adventists and what do they believe (go all the way back to the Millerites)? And who are the Davidians – and the Branches who break off from them – and what do they believe? C) A key claim of the authors is that the Davidians have a script – a sense of an ending of the world and where they fit in it – but there is also interpretive room and uncertainty. Be clear on the argument – and then consider: what you think of it? This point is both a point of context specific to how society responds to apocalyptic groups AND it is a skill from the discipline of religious studies that I want you to learn. That is, a sacred text can be read in many different ways by interpretive communities – and that remains true even when a community is reading the text as a script. (There are other ways of reading a sacred text, and you might brainstorm some other ways that a sacred text might be read as true by readers … without being this kind of script. Alternatively, you might think of other ways that insiders to some belief or thought system acknowledge the uncertainty of that which they hold to be true). Clyde Haberman, "Memories of Waco Siege Continue to Fuel Far Right Groups?" New York Times, July 12 2015 AND Mike Giglio, "A Pro-Trump Military Group ..." [Oathkeepers], The Atlantic (November 2020). I picked these two articles – but frankly, I could have picked a dozen others from the news within the last few months (and a hundred others within the last few years) to get at the ‘legacy of Waco.’WEEK FOURSusan Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny (Ann Arbor: Univ of Michigan Press, 2016), 1-14, 46-55, 64-top of 68, 75-79, 111-123, 127-130, 140-147, 151-160. [Anthropology / Affect Theory]A) When Lepselter says that UFO stories are less about the specific content of the narratives and more about what theorists call affect and what Lepselter speaks about in terms of ‘resonance’ – what does she mean? Why does she claim that UFO stories are as much a form of poetics as a politics? Your 25 cent vocab word: apophenia. B) Lepselter works very hard to resist the tendency to say that UFO conspiracies are actually “about” ______________. Another way to say this: she works hard to resist “reducing” UFO discourse to ____________ (the blank could be psychology, class, history, politics, etc). Why does she do this – and how does she do this? In other words, she is practicing a skill from the discipline of anthropology about how to engage with the viewpoints of others by managing a space of ‘as if’ that I want you to learn.C) What does Lepselter get by situating contemporary UFO discourse within the American genre of captivity narratives?WEEK FIVEMichael Lieb, Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time (Durham: Duke Univ Press, 1998), 1-3 and 129-177 [Discipline: Literary Criticism].A) The first thing I want you to get from the reading is (if you do not already know) to have some sense of the identity and history of the Nation of Islam. Key terms: Fard Muhammad (also known as Wallace Fard or Master W.D. Fard): what was his mission?the lost found tribe of Shabazz/ the lost found Nation of IslamElijah MuhammadThe original tribe of Shabazz: the Original ManYakubThe Mother Plane B) Lieb makes a big deal of the fact that NOI’s apocalyptic narrative is technologized. What is the significance of the fact that the apocalypse is imagined as a machine? What is the significance of a technological sublime? (There is more than one answer to this question, of course: different understandings of the nature of God, of religion (white Christianity vs. the true gnosis of black science), of Jesus). You might also explore comparing and contrasting Elijah’s Muhammad’s way of reading sacred texts (particularly Ezekiel) with Koresh’s. WEEK SIXBlack Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, 2018.Salim Washington, "You act like a th'owed away child:?Black Panther,?Killmonger, and Pan-Africanist African-American identity" Image & Text 33 (2019): 1-29. [Discipline: Cultural Studies] A) The methodological point: Washington draws on a classic article from Stuart Hall about coding and decoding: what is Hall’s idea? How does Washington use it to read Black Panther? And finally if this notion is not old hat to you (because I want you to develop this skill from cultural studies), can you apply this notion to another example? You will also want to think about what it adds to your understanding of the movie 1) to think about it within the tradition of Afrofuturism and, in connection with this, 2) to think about the airship at the end within the tradition of the Mother Plane. WEEK ?Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (London: Reaction Books, 2015): Intro, chapter 1, chapters 6, 7, and 8. [Discipline: Cultural History]. A) Luckhurst traces shifts in the figure of the zombie: sketch the highpoints of these shifts. The disciplinary lens at work here is the insight from literature that the monsters we fear reveal a lot about who we are.B) Why does he think we today tell stories about masses of zombies? C) In addition to thinking about the previous question in terms of our content (why we watch this kind of zombie movies), you also want to think about the previous question on the level of acquiring critical thinking skills from academic disciplines: this is what makes his book a cultural history: he uses history to document a change in how we represent zombies in order to say something about contemporary culture: what is he saying about us? ................
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