Department of History

The postcolonial nation-states of South Asia were created as independent entities following World War II, after almost two decades of British colonial dominance. This course examines political, social, cultural and economic developments in the region from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The focus is on the states carved out of British India in 1947 – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – but we will also consider Afghanistan, Nepal, Myanmar/Burma and Sri Lanka (plus Tibet, currently an Autonomous Region of China, and smaller states such Bhutan and the Maldives), and South Asian migrants in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The course is organized around key themes in the history of the contemporary subcontinent, including the legacies of colonialism and nationalism; ethnic, caste, class and religious conflict; rural poverty, development and environmental change; urbanization and the growth of cities; radical right- and left-wing movements related to regional autonomy claims and extremist religious politics; economic globalization and labor migration; media and popular culture; and global security and new forms of imperialism. This structure will allow us to draw thematic connections between different regions and states in South Asia while examining closely a wide range of specific topics. These might include: nuclearization of India and Pakistan, socialist development projects, radical militant Hindu and Muslim politics, dalit social justice movements, conflict over and militarization of Kashmir, labor migration to the Persian Gulf, the U.S. War on Terror, the rise of Maoist anti-state resistance, globalization of the Bombay Film Industry (‘Bollywood’), rise of IT and call center industries; and others. The overall goal of the course is to introduce key themes and developments in postcolonial South Asia in a connected and global framework, and to provide students tools to develop informed analysis of topics of interest in contemporary South Asia.

This course will provide an advanced introduction to South Asian history and historiography from the early modern period to the present. We will cover major works on key themes, including precolonial cultural relations, colonialism and imperialism, the politics of religious identity, anti-colonialism and nationalism, decolonization and partition, and postcolonial developments. Readings of classics of the field – drawn from various schools of historiography – will be supplemented with selections from relevant primary sources. This is not a survey course, and does not attempt to be comprehensive. No prior knowledge of the field is prerequisite, and the course will begin with a rapid thematic survey of South Asian history. This course is jointly designed for History PhD and MA students for whose research and teaching a knowledge of South Asian history will be useful, and for MAT students who intend to teach South Asian and global history at the advanced secondary level. Requirements include preparation and participation, a series of short response or feedback papers, project presentation, and either a topical historiographical essay (for HIS 536 students), or a lesson plan (for CEG 536 students).

Environment, Medicine, Techno-Science

Crosby, Alfred. Ecological imperialism : the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Drayton, Richard. Nature’s government : science, imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

Foucault, Michel. The order of things : an archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Haraway, Donna. Primate visions : gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Harding, Sandra. The science question in feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Kuhn, Thomas. The structure of scientific revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Latour, Bruno. Laboratory life : the construction of scientific facts. 2nd ed. Princeton  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986.

McNeill, J. R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World. New York: Norton, 2000.

Mitman, Greg. Ecology, community, and American social thought, 1900-1950. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Reverby, Susan. Examining Tuskegee : the infamous syphilis study and its legacy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the air-pump : Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

White, Richard. The Organic Machine. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl : the southern plains in the 1930s. 25th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Gender, Race, Sexuality

Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1992.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Goldberg, David. The racial state. Malden Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.

Hunt, Lynn Avery. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Sinha, Mrinalini. Specters of Mother India : the global restructuring of an Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Colonialism, Capitalism, Modernity

Early Modern Colonialism/Latin America:

Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent conquests : Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Capitalism/World Systems:

Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and material life, 1400-1800. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

Frank, Andre Gunder. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Pomeranz, Kenneth. The great divergence : China, Europe, and the making of the modern world economy. Princeton  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. The Modern World-System. New York: Academic Press, 1974.

Modern Colonialism:

Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Cooper, Frederick. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Modernity:

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford [England]: Blackwell, 1989.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Nation, Popular Politics, Culture

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991.

Hobsbawm, E. J, and T. O Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Scott, James. Weapons of the weak : everyday forms of peasant resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Stedman Jones, Gareth. Languages of class : studies in English working class history, 1832-1982. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the past : power and the production of history. Boston  Mass.: Beacon Press, 1995.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and materialism : selected essays. London : Verso, 2005.

[Most of these books are on library reserve. Search under HIS524. - elb & pg]

Historiographies & Theory

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Cambridge [UK]: Polity Press, 1994.

Eley, Geoff. A crooked line : from cultural history to the history of society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Goody, Jack. The theft of history. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hobsbawm, E. On history. New York: New Press, 1997.

White, Hayden V. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

———. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

[Most of these books are on library reserve. Search under HIS524. - elb & pg]

SBS N-310

Wednesdays

5:20-8:10 PM

Taking oceans, rather than nations or empires, as key units for historical study focuses attention on the movement of people, ideas and commodities across space, and the political and cultural formations that emerge from these circulations. This course will accordingly consider several different stages of globalization from antiquity to the present along the Indian Ocean littoral. We will focus on South and Southeast Asia, eastern and southern Africa, and West Asia (commonly known as the Middle East). A methodological section on oceanic history, and examples of concrete connections with other locations will take us, on occasion, beyond the limits of the Indian Ocean itself. The course will consider, both in minute detail and from a bird’s eye view, inter-regional connections spanning the Indian Ocean world forged by religious solidarities, far-flung trade networks, labor migration, imperial domination, and anti-colonial nationalism.

Mon 2:20-5:10

During the last several centuries, the global imperial ambitions of Europe (and more recently, the US) have remade politics and culture across the world. This course considers people and places linked together by Empire from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. In a context provided by historical and theoretical readings, we will explore the experience of colonialism through a variety of literary representations: novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, letters, music, films, graphic novels and other genres. These sources provide detailed, often personalized, accounts of the experience of the political, economic and cultural domination that colonialism entailed, and the forms of resistance it produced. The colloquium will examine the transformational historical trends of imperialism, anti-colonialism, decolonization and postcolonial migration through units exploring colonialism’s impact on education and identity, cities and mobility, and ideas about race and liberty. We will trace the dialogue between history and representation through looking at specific people, places and texts from Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and metropolitan Europe, as well as recent imperial adventures of the US. Over the course of the semester, students will develop, research and write a term paper on a topic of their interest related to colonial or postcolonial history.

Mon, Wed 11:45-12:40

Recitations: Fri 11:45-12:40, Mon 10:40-11:35, Wed 2:20-3:15

The South Asia region – contemporary India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan – has been a crossroads of diverse people, ideas and commodities for millennia.  This course covers key themes and developments in the subcontinent from antiquity to the rise of British colonialism.  We will begin by covering major issues in early South Asia, and proceed to consider closely the medieval and early modern periods.  Central themes include pre-modern dimensions of the Hindu-Muslim encounter, emergence of South Asian regions, the subcontinent in global networks, and early presence of European powers.

In addition to surveying diverse political, socio-economic and cultural developments across South Asia, the course also raises methodological questions about how different sources provide different perspectives on history.  Accordingly, we consider material evidence alongside various narrative primary sources, as well as scholarly writings.  The course also highlights the importance of historical memory and the continuing relevance of the pre-colonial period in contemporary South Asia.  Overall, the course seeks to provide students with scholarly tools and sources to better understand the formation of religious, ethnic and linguistic communities in South Asia before colonialism.