“Societies are most vulnerable at their edges.”  --Anne McClintock,
Imperial Leather, p. 24

Modernity has been erected on a foundation of difference. Indeed,
modernity’s reigning political philosophy of liberalism – although
underwritten by notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity – was
predicated on racial, ethnic, and gender distinctions elaborated
within European colonial empires. Nationalist and postcolonial
formations have been equally beset by the problematic of belonging
and exclusion. Even in an increasingly global world order, the
proliferation of identity-based movements centered around
ethnolinguistic or religious concerns shows no signs of abating, as
recent conflicts in Serbia and Rwanda attest.

This course is concerned with the poetics and politics of othering.
We will focus on the social, epistemological, and imaginative work
entailed in the construction and maintenance of difference. Cross-
cultural and comparative in scope, the course will center around a
series of situated cases ranging from colonial empires in the period
of “high colonialism” (late 19th-20th centuries) to what are
increasingly known as “alternative modernities” – that is, locations
where key terms of modernity (e.g., democracy, human rights,
equality) are being reconfigured in relation to local concepts and
practices.  A key emphasis of the course will be on the
metadiscursive practices entailed in the construction of difference;
we will look specifically at how the discourse of modernity’s others
has been fashioned in text in ways that create and reinforce social
hierarchies.

Course Format and Expectations: Readings will be drawn primarily
from the discipline of anthropology, supplemented by selections in
history, subaltern studies, political science, communication
studies, and cultural studies.  The course will be run in a seminar
format, with a maximum enrollment of 15. Assignments will likely
include a critical analysis of a novel or film in relation to course
themes, and an extended, 25-page research paper that investigates
one of the seminar topics (or a topic of the student’s choice).
Students will also serve as presenters or discussants several times
during the term. In addition to selected articles, the course may
draw from works including:

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minnesota.
Appadurai, Arjun (ed). 2001. Globalization. Duke.
Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs. 2003. Voices of Modernity:
Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality. Cambridge.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton.
Fanon, Frantz.  1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press.
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and
Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge.
Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in
Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire:
Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things.
Duke.