Postcolonial American Studies (original) (raw)
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SYLLABUS--American Studies: Theories, Methods, Orientations [Graduate Course, Sp'20]
As an intellectual project rather than a fixed, static academic field, American Studies has been at the forefront of advancing theories, methods, and orientations that nuance analyses of global political economy, racial capitalism, uneven power dynamics, differential unfreedoms, the politics of culture, social movements, as well as academic and activist organizing toward social justice. Accordingly, rather than providing a prescriptive map that charts a coherent sense of what American Studies is, this course introduces us to some of its key discussions and debates to consider the ways in which this interdisciplinary formation might enrich, complicate, and re-orientate the conventional assumptions, practices, and values of our respective disciplinary homes. The wide range of multidisciplinary Americanist scholarship considered throughout the semester will thus elucidate alternative orientations, theories, and methods that work to disrupt and reimagine the intimate relationship between knowledge production and violent projects of settler colonialism, incarceration, empire, war, and militarization. Collectively, the readings compel us to foreground the centrality of difference, power, and non-normativity underwriting the histories, cultures, socialities, and politics of "America."
My inquiry is, broadly, a study of the relationship between ethics and historiography, in order to determine the US academy's relationship to its own European heritage of colonial practices. On one end, we encounter an Othering (stressing difference) between the US and its European history, which can be a treacherous denial considering the similarities in our practices to colonial logic. On the other end, we risk claiming "Western history" as our own, which becomes problematic when it obscures our own development from a colonial territory to the contemporary United States. This erases the history of subalternity within the U.S -those internal to the U.S. that do not fit into a European narrative of history are further marginalized. Either extreme creates a doubling perspective that selectively creates a history that invokes questioning the mythical trope of "Americanness," which has much been built upon the western constructions of modernity and the political-the pillars of colonial rule. Specifically, I am setting out to apply some major points made by postcolonial and subaltern studies to the American relationship to European colonial history. By discussing the limits of historicizing, and considering how power functions in terms of historiography, I will investigate the postcolonial relationship of the US to its European heritage, using texts from subaltern studies and beyond, including selections from works by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ranajit Guha, David Lloyd, Donald E. Pease, and Michel Foucault.