ANTH 360 - Problems in Cultural Analysis

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

May be repeated for credit if topic has changed. The Department.

Topic for 2020/21a: The Postcolonial and the Indigenous.   This course compares two overlapping but different critiques of colonialism and modernity: the postcolonial and the indigenous.  In the past two decades we have seen the resurgence of indigeneity, the political and cultural claims of sovereignty by the First Nations.  In this resurgence, an entire set of cherished categories of modern life have been out under renewed scrutiny.  Ideas of progress, development, nation, land, territory, belonging, human, nature and even those of rights, democracy and citizenship, have been questioned by this expanding wave of indigenous intellectuals and activists.  Many of these same categories were also under siege from within an older postcolonial body of critical thinking.  Born out of an experience of and (im)possible life-making after the event of colonialism, Caribbean, African and Asian scholars developed a trenchant critique of some the same categories as above.  Just like indigenous critique, postcolonialism also forced a rethink of the certitudes of the pos-Enlightenment world.  Alternate theories of consciousness, freedom, temporality and race emerged with a great fierceness.  In what ways are these two bodies of critical thought similar to each other?  What is the nature of their differences?  Why are those differences crucial?  Finally, we ask whether we can imagine new cosmologies of freedom or sovereignty that take into account these entangled histories. Readings include Franz Fanon, Ashis Nandy, Saidiya Hartman, Marisol de la Cadena among others. Kaushik Ghosh.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS