468 COLONIALISM AND CULTURE. (1 unit)

Professor Bill Kelleher              Office: 391 Davenport Hall; PH: 244-3516

Wkellehe@uiuc.edu

This course takes the position that the history of colonialism concerns us in our present, that it fashions it and deserves ongoing reinterpretation.  It interrogates anthropology's relationship to colonialism and the politics of anthropological representations of it.  The course considers contemporary theories of coloniality/postcoloniality and the literature which takes exception to the generalities of those theories.  The bulk of the reading will be historicized, ethnographic investigations of colonialism, “postcolonialism,” and neocolonialism.  We will read theoretically informed works on “development” and “race.” Reading requirements are heavy.  We will read a variety of relevant theoretical pieces (Fanon, Foucault, Bhabha, Clifford, Hall, Gramsci, Young, Sahlins, Said, Stocking etc.) as we discuss the monographs.  A research paper is required.  The course is a graduate seminar. At least one course in social and/or cultural theory is a prerequisite for this course.  Required Readings include the following books and a coursepack:

1. Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History.  University of Chicago Press, 1985.

2. Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific.  Princeton University Press, 1997 edition.

3. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge.  Princeton University Press, 1996.

4. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbe. University of California Press, 1999.

5. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development," Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho.  University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

6. Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Displacements.  Duke University Press, 1999.

7. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.  Duke University Press, 1995.

8. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton University Press: 1994.

9. David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality.  Princeton University Press, 1999.