CMCL-C 610: Identity and Difference
Class Number: 25692

Th, 9:00 AM-11:30 AM, MJ 112

Meets with CULS-C 701
Open to Graduates Only!

Instructor: Jane Goodman
Email: janegood@indiana.edu
Office: Mottier Hall 205
Phone: 855-3232

Course Description: 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 related topic of the student’s choice).
Students will 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.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton.

Fanon, Frantz.  1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1978 (1976). The History of Sexuality: An
Introduction. Vol. I. Vintage.

Mehta, Uday Singh. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in
Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago.

Memmi, Albert. 1965 (1957). The Colonizer and the Colonized. Beacon.

Orwell, George. 1934. Burmese Days. Harcourt Brace.

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