California State University, Long Beach
HISTORY 302: THEORY AND HISTORY
This course explores the various theoretical assumptions that ground History as a discipline. We will begin by considering the formation of the discipline and the implicit understandings of context, temporality, and rationality embedded within the practice of History. Then, we will consider how historians have sought to overcome the problems that arise from such understandings and the theoretical and analytical concerns that have remained. Rather than provide a comprehensive survey, the course will pair canonical texts with critical departures and reworkings by later theorists and historians.
HISTORY 385: HISTORIES OF SOUTH ASIA
In his installation Where the Shadows Are So Deep (2016), Imran Qureshi draws our attention to the function of the frame. What does it mean to contain within a frame especially in the miniature form? What qualities does the frame compel? In the installation, the frame becomes increasingly disturbed. The image is no longer protected by an inviolable border. The ordered universe of the miniature falters and we see blood splashed across the wall. As Patricia Townsend writes, "Qureshi disrupts the strict rules of miniature paintings, allowing his images to leak out of their containing frames, creating a powerful impression of loss of law and order and an outbreak of violence" (86).
A course on the history of South Asia is perhaps a compelling space to consider containers, framing, and their loss. When did ‘India’ become the frame, the container, from which we imagine the lives and histories of diverse peoples? India conjures multiple fantasies which we can trace to the emergence of Orientalism and the nation-state. Against such authorizations, what other frames exist to order the world and lives of peoples, for example, an ethical practice such as adab?[2] What cannot be contained in the ordered world of a geographic and historical framing of 'India'? What spills out, however, is itself not 'pure' as leaks remain marked by the frame they escape. The violence of Partition and the flow of capital are but two examples that overflow from the container while further settling its frame.
In this course, we will take a journey much like the one Qureshi depicts. We will consider how containers emerged, how they wavered, and what arose in this wavering. In doing so, our goal is not to find an eternal and authentic 'India' or 'South Asia'. But neither is our goal to merely demonstrate that frames are 'socially constructed.' Rather we want to hesitate within the frames and their spillages to see how 'inside' and 'outside' contaminate each other, produce each other, while remaining attentive to the aporias that emerge in such a constitution.
HISTORY 396: CONTEMPORARY WORLD HISTORY
In this course, we will examine contemporary world history by exploring an essential aspect of modernity: the production and regulation of space alongside the questions space raises about borders, frontiers, sovereignty, nationalism, and migration. Focusing on the late 19th Century to the present, we will approach space world historically. We will pay close attention to capitalism and accumulation; colonialism and empire; mass politics and production; and development and neocolonialism. Offering a comparative method across diverse contexts to understand our contemporary world, this courses grapples with crucial and troubling questions about modernity centered on inclusion, exclusion, migration, detention, production, exchange, and consumption.
HISTORY 438: HISTORY OF MARXIST THOUGHT
This course is a survey of Marxist thought from the mid-19th century to the present. We will focus on the foundations of Marxist thought for World History alongside divergent readings and applications of Marxism with an emphasis on its global dimensions. Importantly, we will explore the history of Marxist thought in order to provide a base to understand the formation of the discipline of World History as well as introduce a key philosophical corpus that shaped not only the writing of history, but historical events themselves. Indeed, Marxist thought grapples within the historical formation of Capitalism as well as how contradictions within a particular historical formation arose and arise. What this all means is that there is no pure object of analysis that gives itself to us, awaiting our insight to properly reflect the world.[1] Instead, we need to rigorously examine said object and how it appears in order to reconsider what we find to be fundamental and self-evident. What is the latent anthropology that emerges in the myths that reproduce a mode of production?
It is important to remember that this course focuses on Marxist thought—a thought that has been continually formed at a conjuncture.[2] We are, therefore, not going to reconstruct a fully formed Marxist thought and then trace applications historically, which we then condemn, lament, or celebrate. Rather, we want to see how Marx and those who followed him revised their thinking within new conflicts and antagonisms alongside the concepts that obfuscate said conflicts.
By the end of the course, you should be able to: (1) Describe and explain the meaning of various key Marxist concepts; (2) Identify and describe the major intellectual revisions and challenges that emerged within Marxist thought; (3) Assess and summarize the debates and arguments regarding the transition to Capitalism; (4) Analyze and compare theoretical paradigms through examination of texts central to the Marxist canon across media forms; (5) Present research findings in a clear and cogent manner, with equal attention to visual and oral arguments.
HISTORY 439: GLOBAL FREUD
Alongside its social, cultural, and economic effects, colonialism was a psychological experience as Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha, Stefania Pandolfo, and others have taught us. This course explores the psychological experience of colonialism by grappling with Sigmund Freud’s corpus and its translation into clinical settings in both the colony and postcolony. In tracing the various historical lineaments of psychoanalytic theory and its translations, this course (1) provides students a foundation to understand the importance of psychoanalytic concepts in the practice of colonial rule (2) an understanding of how the Global South engaged in creative translations of Western theorizations, revealing how peoples extended, subverted, and displaced psychoanalytic thought within non-European contexts.
HISTORY 450/550: FOUCAULT AND HIS CRITICS
In his essay, “Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault reflected upon his work, which, he wrote, sought “to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.” The object of his inquiry, however, was not to liberate the subject from these historical shackles in order to offer a new truth. Instead, Foucault says elsewhere, we should wonder at “what the effects on subjectivity are of the existence of a discourse that claims to tell the truth about subjectivity.” Therefore, Foucault concluded, “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are…We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of the kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries.”
But what is this subject that we are compelled to refuse? What was made and imposed? How do we go about refusing what we are? We will begin to answer these questions historically by exploring how colonialism was crucial in the making of the modern subject Foucault outlines—a noted absence in Foucault’s own work. We will consider, in other words, how the colony functioned as a laboratory to produce the modern subject central to Foucault’s theorization. By foregrounding the colony, we can begin to understand how a refusal of the modern subject is no easy task—a task that requires we also consider the conceptual problems that arise in Foucault’s work once we center colonial relations across the world. In order to understand the essential role of colonialism in forming the subject as articulated by Foucault and the problems that emerge in Foucault’s understandings, the course will pair canonical texts written by Foucault with critical departures and reworkings by later theorists and historians.
HISTORY 499: COMMODITIES: A HISTORY OF THE TRANSFORMATION OF THINGS
When a thing steps out as a commodity, Karl Marx famously explains in Capital, it turns into "a thing which transcends sensuousness" and abounds with “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” A table, for example, "does not only stand with its feet on the ground, but it confronts all other commodities on its head, and develops out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will." In its metamorphosis, a commodity raises important historical questions about the relationship between matter/spirit, substance/form, labor/value, reality/representation and object/subject, but also attachments of the psyche including mourning/melancholia. This course explores this process of turning things into commodities historically. We will examine the unevenness of this process over time, paying close attention to discrepancy and difference in the production of the commodity form in an always incomplete transition to a Capitalist mode of production—a process which includes slavery and colonialism. We will examine a variety of different commodities including labor, sugar, soap, cloth, jute, and human bodies and organs.
HISTORY 510E: LITERATURE OF WORLD HISTORY
This seminar will provide a thematic and conceptual overview of the field of world history. How has “world history” been conceptualized as a coherent subject of inquiry with theoretical unity? Exploring both comprehensive interpretations of the “world,” and thematically limited studies on a world historical scale, our focus will be on the early modern and modern periods. We will examine a range of approaches, including, but not limited to, Marxist theories, world-systems analysis, macro-histories, and post-colonial approaches to the study of world history. We will explore the beginnings of the conceptualization of World History as such, as well as its transformation over the second half of the twentieth century alongside the limitations within the literature. Finally, we will ask: what theoretical and empirical contribution has the study of the non-Western world made to the discipline and conceptual categories of world history?
Columbia University
RELIGION GU4206: HISTORY, TIME, AND TRADITION
In Refashioning Futures, David Scott asks if the accurate reconstruction of the past of an identity is the crucial point of a theoretical intervention. He ponders, instead, if such a historicist analysis should be followed by an emphatic “But so what?” The importance of asking “so what” is that it allows us to begin to refuse, Scott writes, “history its subjectivity, its constancy, its eternity” and “interrupt its seemingly irrepressible succession, causality, its sovereign claim to determinacy” (105). The question “so what?” requires, in other words, we answer for history’s prominence and providence as well as consider other possible formations of community, temporality, and inheritance not anchored by the weight of ‘history’.
This seminar examines the overwhelming hold of “history” in the present by considering Scott’s poignant “But so what?” We will begin by examining the problem-space of ‘history’ itself and how ‘history’ emerged as the foundation to understanding and ordering religious life globally. We will explore the wide-ranging effects of Enlightenment rationality and Orientalist knowledge production as well as consider the imbrication of history with theology and the secular. This section of the course will help develop a shared set of concepts and problematics, which we will continuously encircle throughout. We will then examine how scholars have troubled this historical conscription, reorienting our understandings of temporality, tradition, and the past. The last half of the course, therefore, considers a range of different methods and theories that undo the importance of ‘history’ while remaining attuned to questions of the past, time, and inheritance.
RELIGION GU4219: COLONIALISM AND RELIGION IN SOUTH ASIA
This seminar examines the conceptual trouble wrought by colonial rule in relation to boundaries, both of tradition and identity. We will begin by examining the category of ‘religion’ and how it emerged as an object of inquiry to understand and order life in the South Asian subcontinent. By exploring the wide-ranging effects of Orientalist knowledge production premised on secular historicity, this section of the course will help develop a shared set of concepts, which we will continuously encircle throughout. We will then question the role of this knowledge/power nexus in creating and reifying both notions of ‘fluid’ and ‘communal’ boundaries by studying the internal coherence and colonial inflection of several religious traditions in the subcontinent (Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, and Buddhism). In concluding, we will consider how colonialism shifted the parameters of selfhood, creating new grounds, as well as reifying old ones, from which subjects came to contest the parameters of a given tradition.
RELIGION GU4228: SOUTH ASIA AND THE SECULAR
Scholars have thoroughly reexamined the nature of the secular, noting the secular is, as Talal Asad writes, “neither continuous with the religious” nor “a simple break from it.” Instead, Asad has asked us to consider how the secular functions as a “concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life,” even while remaining unstable in both form and origin. Though recognizing the constitutive nature of the secular in shaping our world, scholars of South Asia have also drawn our attention to different habitations of secularism in the South Asian subcontinent, which, as Rajeev Bhargava argues, provide a source for an ethical mode of being. Others, however, argue secularism dismantles the possibility for, what Ashis Nandy terms, “religious basis of ethnic tolerance in India.” These contestations about the meaning and malleability of the ‘secular’ and its grammar have created a conceptual muddle through its refusal of theoretical orthodoxy, further entrenched by what scholars’ term, “a crisis of secularism” in South Asia.
This seminar explores these different contestations and inflections of the secular in South Asia. Following Asad’s perceptive insights, we will trace a genealogy of the secular, which, while inseparable from disenchanted Christian notions of governance, public space, and the body, gave rise to a particular discursive grammar. Grounding ourselves in this formative space of the secular, we will also study the central role of imperialism within the secular by examining the disciplining and conscripting role of Orientalism and the colonial state. Though noting these changes produced by colonial rule, this course also explores the arguments scholars of South Asia have made distinguishing between “secularisms” and the production of a tolerant and cosmopolitan South Asian orientation, legal or otherwise. In conjunction and against these possibilities, rather than consider the religious retrograde or communal, we will reflect on the continual striving toward political autonomy through disputation in the parameters of a given tradition—which resist incorporation into a broader pluralist or syncretic Indic model. We will end by situating the continued urgency around the ‘crisis of the secular’ in recent controversies related to history and sentiment. Throughout the course, rather than enacting closures, we will dwell on the question of difference by considering Partha Chatterjee’s formidable question: “Is the defence of secularism an appropriate ground” for confronting the violent and often intractable challenges we face today.
RELIGION GR6411: PUNJAB AND RELIGION
This graduate seminar examines religion in Punjab from the Early Modern period to the present. This is difficult task since both ‘Punjab’ and ‘religion’ elude easy definitions. Therefore, we will begin by asking: what is Punjab and what is religion? Why do these concepts hold sway today and historically? Emphasizing these questions throughout the course, we will move chronologically reading key scholarly texts that have explored the variegated religious traditions of Punjab, the emergence of Punjabi-ness (Punjabiyat) in a shared religious space, as well as the often-tenuous relationship between religion and state power in Punjab. We will investigate themes such as (1) Early Modern Religion and Historicity (2) Syncretism and Shared Space (3) Orientalism and Colonial Knowledge Production (4) Religious Reform and (5) Decolonization and Nationalism. Finally, this course includes an international travel component. During Spring Break, we will travel to various sites in East Punjab to consider the contradictory and disputed nature of Punjab’s religious traditions while remaining attentive to the many intricate historical legacies that saturate the Punjab landscape.
RELIGION GU4206: HISTORY, TIME, AND TRADITION
In Refashioning Futures, David Scott asks if the accurate reconstruction of the past of an identity is the crucial point of a theoretical intervention. He ponders, instead, if such a historicist analysis should be followed by an emphatic “But so what?” The importance of asking “so what” is that it allows us to begin to refuse, Scott writes, “history its subjectivity, its constancy, its eternity” and “interrupt its seemingly irrepressible succession, causality, its sovereign claim to determinacy” (105). The question “so what?” requires, in other words, we answer for history’s prominence and providence as well as consider other possible formations of community, temporality, and inheritance not anchored by the weight of ‘history’.
This seminar examines the overwhelming hold of “history” in the present by considering Scott’s poignant “But so what?” We will begin by examining the problem-space of ‘history’ itself and how ‘history’ emerged as the foundation to understanding and ordering religious life globally. We will explore the wide-ranging effects of Enlightenment rationality and Orientalist knowledge production as well as consider the imbrication of history with theology and the secular. This section of the course will help develop a shared set of concepts and problematics, which we will continuously encircle throughout. We will then examine how scholars have troubled this historical conscription, reorienting our understandings of temporality, tradition, and the past. The last half of the course, therefore, considers a range of different methods and theories that undo the importance of ‘history’ while remaining attuned to questions of the past, time, and inheritance.
RELIGION GU4219: COLONIALISM AND RELIGION IN SOUTH ASIA
This seminar examines the conceptual trouble wrought by colonial rule in relation to boundaries, both of tradition and identity. We will begin by examining the category of ‘religion’ and how it emerged as an object of inquiry to understand and order life in the South Asian subcontinent. By exploring the wide-ranging effects of Orientalist knowledge production premised on secular historicity, this section of the course will help develop a shared set of concepts, which we will continuously encircle throughout. We will then question the role of this knowledge/power nexus in creating and reifying both notions of ‘fluid’ and ‘communal’ boundaries by studying the internal coherence and colonial inflection of several religious traditions in the subcontinent (Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, and Buddhism). In concluding, we will consider how colonialism shifted the parameters of selfhood, creating new grounds, as well as reifying old ones, from which subjects came to contest the parameters of a given tradition.
RELIGION GU4228: SOUTH ASIA AND THE SECULAR
Scholars have thoroughly reexamined the nature of the secular, noting the secular is, as Talal Asad writes, “neither continuous with the religious” nor “a simple break from it.” Instead, Asad has asked us to consider how the secular functions as a “concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life,” even while remaining unstable in both form and origin. Though recognizing the constitutive nature of the secular in shaping our world, scholars of South Asia have also drawn our attention to different habitations of secularism in the South Asian subcontinent, which, as Rajeev Bhargava argues, provide a source for an ethical mode of being. Others, however, argue secularism dismantles the possibility for, what Ashis Nandy terms, “religious basis of ethnic tolerance in India.” These contestations about the meaning and malleability of the ‘secular’ and its grammar have created a conceptual muddle through its refusal of theoretical orthodoxy, further entrenched by what scholars’ term, “a crisis of secularism” in South Asia.
This seminar explores these different contestations and inflections of the secular in South Asia. Following Asad’s perceptive insights, we will trace a genealogy of the secular, which, while inseparable from disenchanted Christian notions of governance, public space, and the body, gave rise to a particular discursive grammar. Grounding ourselves in this formative space of the secular, we will also study the central role of imperialism within the secular by examining the disciplining and conscripting role of Orientalism and the colonial state. Though noting these changes produced by colonial rule, this course also explores the arguments scholars of South Asia have made distinguishing between “secularisms” and the production of a tolerant and cosmopolitan South Asian orientation, legal or otherwise. In conjunction and against these possibilities, rather than consider the religious retrograde or communal, we will reflect on the continual striving toward political autonomy through disputation in the parameters of a given tradition—which resist incorporation into a broader pluralist or syncretic Indic model. We will end by situating the continued urgency around the ‘crisis of the secular’ in recent controversies related to history and sentiment. Throughout the course, rather than enacting closures, we will dwell on the question of difference by considering Partha Chatterjee’s formidable question: “Is the defence of secularism an appropriate ground” for confronting the violent and often intractable challenges we face today.
RELIGION GR6411: PUNJAB AND RELIGION
This graduate seminar examines religion in Punjab from the Early Modern period to the present. This is difficult task since both ‘Punjab’ and ‘religion’ elude easy definitions. Therefore, we will begin by asking: what is Punjab and what is religion? Why do these concepts hold sway today and historically? Emphasizing these questions throughout the course, we will move chronologically reading key scholarly texts that have explored the variegated religious traditions of Punjab, the emergence of Punjabi-ness (Punjabiyat) in a shared religious space, as well as the often-tenuous relationship between religion and state power in Punjab. We will investigate themes such as (1) Early Modern Religion and Historicity (2) Syncretism and Shared Space (3) Orientalism and Colonial Knowledge Production (4) Religious Reform and (5) Decolonization and Nationalism. Finally, this course includes an international travel component. During Spring Break, we will travel to various sites in East Punjab to consider the contradictory and disputed nature of Punjab’s religious traditions while remaining attentive to the many intricate historical legacies that saturate the Punjab landscape.