Global Arc

This seminar will examine this global history of anticolonial, anti-racial, and postcolonial thought during the twentieth century. We will read the works by key 20th century anticolonial thinkers and activists - Mahatma Gandhi, WEB Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Edward Said, and others. Will read these historical texts critically and ask: How do they understand colonialism and its relationship between colonial domination and race, culture, and economy? How do they understand colonialism as a global system? How do they think of liberation and world transformation?

What do you know about Marxism? Public discourse and academia in the U.S. often dismiss Marx and the Marxist method: economic determinism at its worst; simplistically teleological; Marxists ignore race, gender, culture, and the environment; the Communist Manifesto sums it all up; Soviet totalitarianism proved its utopian failure. Is all this true? Let's test it. Let's take Marxism seriously. This course begins with fundamental works by Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Lenin and then expands to study how social and natural sciences have used the method to explain key processes in their domains.

This seminar examines Gandhi's political life extending from his campaign for the rights of Indians in South Africa to his role in the struggle for Indian independence from British rule. Focus on those historical processes that turned M. K. Gandhi into a major 20th-century figure--the Mahatma. Issues relating to imperialism and nationalism form the context in which the seminar looks at Gandhi's life and seeks to understand Gandhian ideology and its different--often conflicting--historical appropriations. One three-hour seminar.

This is an undergraduate seminar about the urban experiences and representations of the modern city as society. Beginning with the premise that the "soft city" of ideas, myths, symbols, images, and psychic expressions are as important as the "hard city" of bricks and mortar, this course explores the experiences and imaginations of modern cities in different historical contexts. Among cities we will examine are Manchester, London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Algiers, Bombay, and Hong Kong. The course will use a variety of materials, but will focus particularly on cinema to examine different imaginative expressions of the urban experience.

This seminar situates cultural production in Ba`thist Syria (1970-present)--in terms of its conditions of creation, circulation and reception--within a broader framework, namely, the history of modern Syria. Through an exploration of historical debates in the scholarly literature on politics, aesthetics and culture, students will both contextualize and comment upon ongoing discussions surrounding contemporary Syria. The course engages with a wide range of media, from literature and drama to television and film. All readings are in English, although those with interests/abilities in French or Arabic will be encouraged to exercise them.

How do representations of men and women, past and present, intersect with popular memories of and attitudes towards gender and sexuality? Thinking through this question with reference to India, this course will entail a close reading of one Bollywood film (with English subtitles) each week alongside an engagement with scholarly studies of the histories of gender and sexuality and of film in South Asia. Students will learn to be critical and historically sensitive viewers of film. They will also reflect critically on the crafting and re-crafting of popular memory, placing remembered pasts in dialog with scholarly approaches.

Venice, from unpromising beginnings on a marshy lagoon, succeeded in becoming a major commercial and territorial power that by the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance sought to rival the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires and dominate much of the Mediterranean world. This seminar will look at the development of both the city itself and its empire - the stato da mar stretching from the Adriatic to the Aegean and Libyan Seas - against a backdrop of conflict and exchange between Christians, Muslims and Jews. We shall learn about political, social and economic history, but also about art, architecture and literature.

Who is a Hindu? Or, for that matter, who is a Muslim or an untouchable? Like today, these were vexed questions in pre-modern South Asia. This seminar will think through the history of social inequality and cultural difference in India from the earliest Muslim presence in South Asia until the region's conquest by the English East India Company in the eighteenth century. By juxtaposing modern-day scholarly writing on these subjects with primary-source material that circulated in a popular milieu, the seminar will encourage students to explore pre-modern responses to hierarchy, conflict, discrimination, and persecution.

This course will trace the history of Christianity in Africa from the first to twentieth centuries. We will focus on issues as diverse as the importance of Christians from Africa in the development of central Christian doctrines and institutions, the medieval Christian-Muslim encounter, the modern missionary movement, colonization and decolonization, the role of the church in freedom struggles, and more. We will ask the questions:how does studying the history of Christianity in Africa de-center Europe and the European experience in the history of Christianity? And:What would a global history of Christianity, pre-modern and modern, look like?

This course will explore the history of political propaganda in the context of mass politics, international rivalries, colonialism, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century. We will discuss the use (and abuse) of visual images and verbal messages, channels of delivering them to audiences, and their reactions. The topics for comparative and cross-cultural study of mass persuasion will include avant-garde art and propaganda, the cult of political leaders in totalitarian regimes, propaganda of hate and genocide, new media and terrorism, "weaponization" of information in international politics, and more.