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 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 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 (SENIOR SEMINAR)
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.
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.
