Postcolonial Histories and Theories
©️ Omnia El Shakry
Description
This course will provide a critical theoretical “toolkit” for the general study of colonial and postcolonial histories and theories. In addition to providing a basic grounding in theories of the decentered subject and theories of ideology, we will also explore texts that help us conceptualize colonialism as an historical, political, and psychological experience.
Themes include the relation between Self and Other in the colonial encounter, Orientalism and the writing of post-Orientalist history, the connection between European ideologies, such as liberalism, and colonialism, the relationship between colonialism and modernity, biopolitics, necropolitics, modernity, and postmodernity.
Recommended Readings
G.W.F. Hegel, “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness,” in Phenomenology of Spirit.
Karl Marx, The Economic Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. “Estranged Labor,” “Private Property and Communism,” “The Power of Money in Bourgeois Society.”
________. “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” Capital, vol. 1, chapter 3.
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, translated by Walter Kaufmann (Vintage, 1989), pp. 14-163.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by James Strachey 1900, Ch. II-VII.
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy.
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Translated and edited by Quentin Hoare Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” “What Is an Author?” and “Theatrum Philosophicum” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. Donald F. and Sherry Simon Bouchard. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
_____, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8. No. 4. (Summer 1982), pp. 777-795.
_____, “Truth and Power” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 (Pantheon, 1980), pp. 117-122 [comments on ideology & repression].
_____, “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp.87-104.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978).
Schedule of Readings
Week I: Introduction
Week II: Subalternity and Difference
Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds. Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford University Press, 1988).
Gayatrai Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” “Sly Civility,” in The Location of Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85-101.
Week III: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism,” The American Historical Review 99/5 (1994): 1475-1490.
Week IV: The Colonial Encounter: Psychoanalytic Re-visitations
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Charles Markmann (New York: Grove Press, [1952]1967).
Week V: Decolonization and its Discontents
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
Week VI: Writing Post-Orientalist Histories
Gyan Prakash, “Writing Post-Orientalist Historiographies” CSSH, 32.2 (1990) and “Can the Subaltern Ride?” CSSH, 34.1 (1992)
Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, “After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World,” CSSH, 34:1 (1992).
Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London & New York: Routledge, 1990), 1-90.
Week VII: Colonialism and Modernity
Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge, 1988).
Week VIII: Liberalism
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty [1859].
John Stuart Mill, A Few Words on Non-intervention, pp. 110-124.
Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” in The Location of Culture.
Uday Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Ann Stoler and Fred Cooper (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (University of California Press, 1997), pp. 59-86.
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Liberal Imperialism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), Introduction, chapter 5.
Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2011).
Week IX: Modernity and Temporality
Timothy Mitchell, “The Stage of Modernity,” Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minnesota, 2000), pp. 1-34.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3-71.
Reinhardt Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 231-288.
Stefania Pandolfo, “The Thin Line of Modernity: Some Moroccan Debates on Subjectivity, in Mitchell, ed., Questions of Modernity (Minnesota, 2000), pp. 115-147.
Week X: On the Postcolony
Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony
_____, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (1): 2003.