DSPO 27A79 - Narrative Power and Public Imagination

This course examines how narrative and public imagination function as democratic infrastructure, shaping the conditions under which communities understand themselves, organize collective life, and make new political and institutional possibilities tangible.

The course is shaped in part through my role as the inaugural Alain Locke Fellow at La Maison des Arts et de la Création at Sciences Po. Locke understood art, narrative, and cultural production not as secondary to democratic life, but as central to the formation of identity, public imagination, and modern citizenship.

Drawing implicitly on Donald Hollowell’s distinction between the courtroom battle and the kitchen table battle, the course treats narrative not as retrospective commentary, but as a primary site through which communities shape public meaning, democratic aspiration, and the conditions under which institutional change becomes possible.

The course approaches the public imagination as a contested civic space shaped not only through law, media, and formal politics, but through oral tradition, music, ritual, performance, literature, visual culture, migration, humor, spirituality, digital culture, social media, and communal memory. Particular attention is given to the ways communities across the Black diaspora and other historically marginalized communities have generated sophisticated narrative traditions capable of reshaping how societies understand belonging, legitimacy, freedom, kinship, and possibility itself.

The course also explores how democratic knowledge is often produced culturally before it is formalized institutionally. Kitchen tables, churches, beauty salons, protest movements, second lines, music, rumor, social media, memes, short-form video, and family stories all become sites where communities narrate

themselves into public life and shape the conditions under which broader democratic transformation becomes imaginable and actionable.

Particular attention is given to the United States not as a singular democratic experience, but as a vast and often contradictory constellation of regional, racial, diasporic, religious, and civic traditions. Students will examine how different communities have used narrative to produce forms of continuity, resistance, beauty, joy, memory, and political imagination across shifting historical conditions.

Throughout the semester, students will engage literature, essays, speeches, oral histories, film, music, visual art, performance, speculative fiction, and contemporary digital and social media ecosystems alongside legal, sociological, and democratic theory. The course approaches these materials as repositories of democratic thought, communal memory, symbolic life, and imaginative possibility.

Particular attention will be given to the Harlem Renaissance as one of the great projects of narrative, aesthetic, and democratic world-building in modern American life, through which Black communities crafted new visual, literary, musical, and political vocabularies capable of reshaping public imagination.

The course also explores Afrofuturism as a tradition of speculative world-building through which Black communities imagined futures, identities, technologies, and forms of freedom beyond the limits imposed by dominant social and political systems.

The course proceeds from the proposition that communities use narrative, memory, ritual, and imagination to construct shared understandings of who they are, what they value, and the worlds they wish to bring into being, casting new suns under which collective life, freedom, beauty, and belonging become tangible.

At its core, the course asks: How do communities narrate themselves into public life and power?

Academic expectations

Students are expected to:

 complete assigned readings and media before each seminar;

 actively participate in discussion-based seminar sessions;

 engage respectfully and thoughtfully with classmates and course materials;

 bring curiosity, interpretive rigor, and intellectual openness to discussions;

 integrate textual analysis with visual, sonic, historical, cultural, and digital interpretation;  demonstrate a willingness to connect narrative, culture, institutions, technology, and democratic life across disciplinary boundaries.

This course is structured as an interdisciplinary seminar rather than a lecture course. Students should expect close reading, collaborative interpretation, and sustained engagement with literature, music, visual culture, oral history, film, speculative fiction, and contemporary digital and social media ecosystems as sites through which public meaning, collective identity, and democratic imagination are constructed and contested.