| Instructor: Professor Gillian Hart email: hart@berkeley.edu office phone: 643-1473 office: 551 McCone office hours: M 4-6 (or by appt.) |
Class Location: 575 McCone Class Time: MW 2-3:30 Course control number: 36520 Units: 4 |
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Course Description
The term ‘postcolonial’ is often used descriptively to refer to peoples, states, and societies that have been through a process of formal decolonization. In recent years the term has taken on far more critical meaning in the lively and growing field of ‘postcolonial studies’ that focuses on how processes of colonialism/imperialism continue even after the formal dissolution of empire. Originally associated with literary criticism and cultural studies, postcolonial scholarship is increasingly being pushed to engage with questions of political economy, and with more grounded understandings of transnational power and inequality. Events in the Middle East lend particular urgency to this project – as do recent calls for the overt revival of imperialism. A central argument of this course is that critical human geography can make important contributions to understandings of the interconnections between forces at play in different parts of the world. Through critical engagement with taken-for-granted concepts of space, place, culture, power, and difference, its purpose is to provide a set of tools for grappling with the conditions in which we find ourselves, and for thinking about the possibilities for social change. Course Requirements Students are expected to come to class having read all the readings for that day, and prepared to discuss them. The course requirements will comprise two take-home assignments (25% each), and a final exam (50%). The details and dates of the assignments will be discussed in class. Readings The reader for the first half of the course is available at University Copy, 2425 Channing. |
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I. THE IMPERIAL PRESENT:
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Space, Place, Culture, Power, & Difference
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| 8/28: | Clashing Cultures and Bloody Borders | |
| Huntington, S. 1993. The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs 72 (3). http://www.alamut.com/subj/economics/misc/clash.html _____. 2000. Why Culture Matters. In Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. New York: Basic Books: xiii-xvi. Barnett, T. 2003. The Pentagon’s New Map. Esquire. http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/pentagonsnewmap.htm |
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| 9/6– 9/18: | Struggles over Geography | |
| Said, E. 2002. The Clash of Definitions. In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 569-590. _____. 1993. Empire, Geography, and Culture. In Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books: 3-14. Mitchell, T. 2002. McJihad: Islam in the US Gobal Order. Social Text 24(1): 1-18. Mamdani, M. 2002. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: An African Perspective. www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays Massey, D. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 146-56; 1-4; ____ 1995. Places and their Pasts. History Workshop Journal 38: 182-192. Gregory, D. 2004. The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford: Blackwell: Chapters 2, 4, & 9. |
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| 9/25 – 9/27: | Rethinking American Empire: Space, Race, & Gender | |
| Bender, T. 2006. A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History. New York: Hill & Wang: Introduction & Chapter 4. Chukwudi Eze, E. 1997. Race and the Enlightenment. Oxford: Blackwell: 1-9. Jefferson, T. [orig. 1787] “The Difference is Fixed in Nature” from Notes on the State of Virginia (Reprinted in Eze): 95-108. Bederman, G. 1995. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: Chapters 1& 5. Independent Television Service. 2003. Race: The Power of an Illusion. Episode 2, “The Stories we Tell.” (Video) |
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II. LIMITS OF EMPIRE:
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Anti-Colonial Movements & Postcolonial Imaginations
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| 10/2: | The Age of Empire | |
| Newspaper clippings in reader. Ferguson, Niall. 2002. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. New York: Basic Books: xii-xxix; 358-370. Cooper, F. 2006. Modernizing Colonialism and the Limits of Empire. In C. Calhoun et al (eds) Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories & American Power. New York: The New Press: 63-72. |
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| 10/9: | C. L. R. James | |
| James, C.L.R. 1963 [orig. 1938] The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Books: Preface to First Edition, and Appendix. Trouillot, M-R. 1995. An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event. In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press: 70-107. |
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| 10/11–16: | Fanon & Cabral | |
| Gibson, N. 2003. Fanon: The Postcolonial Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press: 1-14; 177-205. Fanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press: 35-43; 92-156; 200-205. Ahluwalia, P. 2001. ‘Decolonization and National Liberation’ in Politics and Postcolonial Theory. London: Routledge: 34-51. Cabral, A. 1973. National Liberation and Culture. In Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amilcar Cabral. New York: Monthly Review Press: 39-56. Davidson, B. 1992. The Black Man’s Burden. New York: Times Books: 290-308. |
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| 10/18: | Gramsci on the Southern Question & Popular Culture | |
| Gramsci, A. 2000 [orig. 1927]. Some Aspects of the Southern Question. In D. Forgacs (ed) The Antonio Gramsci Reader. New York: New York University Press: 171-185. Davidson, A. 1984. Gramsci, the Peasantry, and Popular Culture. Journal of Peasant Studies 11(4): 139-54. |
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| 10/23: | The Limits of Imperial Rule | |
| Lugard, Lord Frederick. 1926. The White Man’s Task in Tropical Africa. Foreign Affairs. Berry, S. 1993. Hegemony on a Shoestring. In No Condition is Permanent. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press: Ch. 2. |
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III. PRODUCING POSTCOLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES
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(Preliminary: subject to revision)
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| 10/25-10/30: | The New Imperialism? | |
| Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Silver, B. and G. Arrighi. 2003. Polanyi’s ‘Double Movement’: The Belles Époques of British and US Hegemony Compared. Politics and Society 31 (4): 325-55. Finnegan, William. 2003. The Economics of Empire: Notes on the Washington Consensus. Harper’s Magazine: May: 41-54; recent articles on Bolivia. |
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| 11/1 – 11/8: | Political Islam, Oil, & the Politics of Extraction | |
| Beinin, Joel & Joe Stork. 1996. On the Modernity, Historical Specificity, and International Context of Political Islam. In Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hirschkind, Charles and Saba Mahmood. 2002. Feminism, the Taliban and the Politics of Counterinsurgency, Anthropological Quarterly 75(2):339-354. Lubeck, Paul. 2000. Antinomies of Islamic Movements under Globalization. In R. Cohen and S. Rai (eds) Global Social Movements. London: The Athlone Press:. Delta Force (Video) Watts, Michael. 2002. Petro-Violence: Community, Extraction and the Political Ecology of a Mythic Commodity. In N. Peluso and M. Watts (eds) Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. |
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| 11/13-11/22: | Reclaiming the Land: Land Reforms & Agrarian Movements | |
| Ladejinsky, Wolf. 1950. “Too Late to Save Asia?” in L. Walinsky (ed) Land Reform as Unfinished Business: The Selected Papers of Wolf Ladejinsky. Oxford University Press: 130-135. Hart, Gillian. 2002. “Accumulation without Dispossession: East Asian Agrarian Debates,” in Disabling Globalization. University of California Press: 214-224. Deere, Carmen and M. Leon. 2001. Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America. University of Pittsburgh Press: 62-68. Bernstein, Henry. 2002. Land Reform: Taking a Long(er) View. Journal of Agrarian Change. 2 (4): 433-463. Casolo, Jennifer. 2004. "Voz y Voto in Deed? Gender, Land Rights and Power in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch". Paper to be presented at the International Conference of Critical Geography, Mexico City. Jan Rocha, 2003. “Cutting the Wire”: The Landless Movement in Brazil. Current History 102 (661). Angus Wright & Wendy Wolford. 2003. To Inherit the Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for the New Brazil. Oakland: Food First Books: selected pages. |
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| 11/27-12/6: | Linking Rural and Urban Struggles | |
| Baviskar, Amita. 2001. Written on the Body, Written on the Land: Violence & Environmental Struggles in Central India. In N. Peluso and M. Watts (eds) Violent Environments. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ___. 2003. Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power, and Identity in the Making of Metropolitan Delhi. Unesco. NACLA Report on the Americas. 2004. Water, Inc. Hart, Gillian. 2006. Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Time of Resurgent Imperialism. Antipode 38(5). |
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