ANTH 387 - Revolutionary Subjects and Political Futures

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as INTL 387) This class is a multidisciplinary inquiry into the global re-making of revolutionary subjects in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Through ethnographies, film, primary texts (including speeches and texts by revolutionary leaders and political movements), literature, poetry, and art across a wide range of regional contexts, we pursue two interrelated tracks of inquiry, as students develop semester-long independent writing projects. The first half of the class is dedicated to studying foundational debates in Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial thought regarding the formation of revolutionary political classes. Moving across Haiti, Russia, England, Cuba, India, China, and Algeria, we examine how political movements and scholars have debated the emancipatory potential of different political groups in response to specific social struggles across the world. In particular, we study debates concerning the foundational figure of the proletarian worker, and how the conditions of slaves, women, peasants and rural people, subaltern classes, migrants, and the urban poor have figured within them. The second half of the class is dedicated to reading ethnographic monographs about contemporary social movements and popular struggles. Cases include the Naxalite movement in India, food sovereignty and farmer-to-farmer movements in Cuba and North America, land occupations and evictions in South Africa, imaginaries of sovereignty and repair in the Caribbean, and the Movement for Black Lives in the United States. Our readings are supplemented by guest lectures from scholar-activists and close study of ethnographic films. Through a comparative approach rooted in traditions of critical political economy and engaged anthropology, students come away from this class with a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of many of the world’s most significant political movements – including the lessons (and cautions) they may hold for addressing our current planetary predicaments and shared political futures. China Sajadian.

Prerequisite(s): Previous coursework in Anthropology/International Studies or permission of the instructor.

One 3-hour period.

Course Format: CLS