GCS 410 Issues in International Studies
This seminar will be acomparative look at European and American imperialism, broadly defined, to examine how colonial encounters and societies shaped intersecting discourses of gender and race. The current generation of feminist and postcolonial scholars has reinvigorated the analysis of empire by placing questions of gender and race at the forefront. Thus the seminar will draw from a broad range of readings, including interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks as well as historical scholarship, across a vast geography: from Africa to Latin America, India to Ireland, and the Pacific to the Caribbean. We will not pretend to cover all these areas comprehensively; rather they will provide a sampling of compelling and multifaceted cases for study. Our temporal focus will be on the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, to trace the origins and development of what has been called the "golden age" of Euro-American imperialism. While the chronology of political history therefore plays an important role in our study, we will look beyond political administrators to include the actions and perspectives of less obvious "agents of imperialism" such as travelers, missionaries, slaveholders, photographers, cultural brokers, and capitalists. We will likewise complicate definitions of colonial subjects by taking into account their diverse identities, positions, and forms of resistance, such as the development of indigenous feminist and nationalist ideologies. At times we will adopt an explicitly comparative perspective regarding the workings of gender and race in metropole and colony; but even then we will consider carefully the specific local, human, and material dimensions of imperialism.
Prerequisite
None