Instructor: M. Griffiths
FULFILLS GLOBAL CORE REQUIREMENT
This course is an attempt to connect developments in postcolonial studies to developments in science studies, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies. Students will practice close reading of literary, ethnographic, and archival texts and will respond to these texts through critical academic writing, wherein they will enact their own close readings.
Through global twentieth century literary texts, the course explores the idea that modernity has not destroyed but rather transformed anti-modern and nonhuman modes of experience. Have “pre-modern” or “archaic” ways of worlding from the Global South changed through contact with European Imperialism? Or have they rather subtly affected the intellectual project of Enlightenment modernity as it encroaches on them? The governance of the prior, as Elizabeth Povinelli calls it, striates postcolonial and settler colonial space, unmaking the contours of “modern” and premodern on which neocolonial modes of domination rely. If, as Bruno Latour asserts, the illusion of modernity emerges from its faith in its own purification of differing spheres (the economic and the religious, say), and if the so-called primitive socius is constituted through what Marcel Mauss called the “total social fact,” then how might the assertion that “we have never been modern” change for those who have been refused inclusion in the category “human?” It is this tension between total social fact and apparatus of spherical purification that students will explore in the course.
