Department of History

By now, it has become widely accepted that History (with a capital H) was deeply implicated in naturalizing the territorially delimited nation-state as one of the fundamental categories of historical analysis and narration. This recognition of the radical historicity of their own disciplinary knowledge is leading many historians to take the “transnational turn.” Despite the rapid spread of transnational studies, however, the theoretical thrust and the political valences of the concept still remain imprecise.

Furthermore, so many of the works which march under this banner do so with little or no critical analysis of race, gender, and sexuality. This seminar will explore how ideas on gender, race, and class helped structure global flows of peoples, ideas, and goods and legitimize the unequal power relations that they embodied. In this seminar, we will also discuss how the state serves as a “surface of articulation” between the global and the national. In the end, we will all learn that transnational perspective affects historical narratives and the making of alternative possibilities. The ultimate goal of this seminar is to reflect on strengths, the weaknesses, and future directions of the current transnational turn.

The first half of the seminar will be devoted to reading and discussing recent scholarly literature in the field in order to help students define the parameters and guiding questions for their own research (Readings include selections from: Postcolonial Disorders; Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World; Matthew P. Guterl, American Mediterranean; T. Ballantyne/A. Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact; Étienne Balibar on transnational citizenship; Geoff Eley, “Historicizing the Global”; S. Conrad/D. Sachsenmai (eds.), Competing Visions of World Oder: Global Moments and Movements). Students are expected to submit a research paper (20-25 pages).

This Theme Seminar, intended primarily for aspiring Ph.D. students from any regional concentration or discipline, explores the history of what anthropologist Sidney Mintz calls the “food-drugs”–sugar, tobacco, coffee, alcohol, betel, chocolate, yerba mate, coca and the like.  It examines their creation as commodities and their powerful historical contributions to colonialism, capitalism and modernity.  More broadly, it is an introduction to the “new” commodity history and its expanding global horizons.  The core thematic questions posed are:  How were these food-drug commodities “constructed” out of things and/or from long-standing embedded social relationships?  How did certain local substances become profitable long-distance commodities after the 16^th-century world conquests and become accepted and popular objects of mass consumption?  Why did others become eventually categorized, during the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as unworthy, dangerous or illicit goods?  How did this commercial “psycho-active revolution” affect, culturally, politically and economically, the making of the modern world?  Students will take on interdisciplinary literatures (from Anthropology and Sociology) about commodity-formation and a broad series of recent monographs on particular substances, ending on those now deemed illicit.  About half of the literature is based on American-hemisphere substances and their global entanglements.

After a few weeks of introductory (more theoretical) readings, the Seminar revolves around weekly discussions of exemplary recent monographs about various food-drug commodities. There will be a collective mid-term “writing exercise” (around Weeks 7-8) and students will write and present a historiographic paper on the food-drug of their choice (Due Dec. 6). This seminar demands intensive reading and critical discussion and welcomes graduate students with interdisciplinary concerns. Office hours (MW 12-2 SBS N333), are best by appointment. The following seminar books (most worth buying) are available at Stony Brooks (only): W. Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: Social History of Spices, Stimulants & Intoxicants Vintage Arnold Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge) Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Penguin) Sophie and Michael Coe, The True History of Chocolate (Thames & Hudson) Judith Carney, Black Rice: African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Harvard) Jeremy Pilcher, Que Vivan los Tamales!: Food & the Making of Mexican Identity (New Mexico) David Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs & the Making of the Modern World (Harvard) F. Bruce Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon (North Atlantic Books-& varied publishers) Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: Coffee and how it Transformed our World (Basic Bks) Paul Gootenberg, ed., Cocaine: Global Histories (Routledge) John Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (Perennial)

The State University of New York at Stony Brook, in cooperation with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, will hold a conference in Stony Brook on March 20-21, 2009, on “The Worlds of Lion Gardiner, c. 1599-1663: Crossings and Boundaries.” Military man and engineer, chronicler and diplomat, lord of a New English manor married to a Dutch woman, Gardiner led a life replete with crossings: of the English Channel to engage in Continental wars, of the Atlantic, of the lesser waters of Long Island Sound, of national, imperial, and colonial borders, of racial divides, and of the very bounds of colonial law. The many crossings in which he and his contemporaries were involved did much to create boundaries between things previously less clearly separated.

Conference website, schedule, and other info

On-line Registration

This seminar takes legal systems and the criminalization of social groups as lenses on modern states’ techniques for disciplining populations, reproducing structures of privilege, and articulating nationalist ideologies. In addition to looking from the perspective of states, we consider the ways subjects and citizens manipulate, modify and evade legal regimes. Moving from the early modern period through the contemporary, the course takes on themes ranging from legal pluralism, social banditry, law and cultural difference under colonial regimes, prisons and rehabilitation, ethnic profiling and criminalization, and the place of outlaws in nationalist rhetoric. The course will be interdisciplinary, incorporating comparative and monographic historical and anthropological studies, theoretical works and literary texts; and transregional, with units examining particular themes in South Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, the US, and other other locations. Readings may include books or articles by scholars Lauren Benton, Michel Foucault, Carlo Ginzburg, Ranajit Guha, Eric Hobsbawm, Eric Tagliacozzo, Richard L. Roberts, Nicolas Shumway, Radhika Singha, and some selections from literary or historical primary sources.

Please feel free to visit the website for the conference I recently convened at Stony Brook, along with University of Exeter’s Joseph Melling, December 13-15, 2008, on “Dangerous Trade: Histories of Industrial Hazard Across a Globalizing World.”

Among the results of the conference are a planned edited volume, as well as a proposal for a Code of Sustainable Practice for Multinational Corporations, which appeared in the July 2008 International Journal for Occupational and Environmental Health.

Mark your calendars for two major conference being sponsored by the History Department in 2008-2009.

I. “Cosmopolis 18th Century in the Age of Sail”

Stony Brook Manhattan October 23 and October 24, 2008

Schedule, Abstracts, Bios of Main Speakers

II. “The Worlds of Lion Gardiner, c. 1599-1663: Crossings and Boundaries”

Stony Brook, New York, March 20-21, 2009

Conference site, schedule, and other info

Registration

Link to the call for papers