Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Specific details of courses to be offered will be published prior to enrollment each term.

COURSE DETAILS:

South Asia is a region whose conflicts have generated enormous quantities of explanation. Partition violence, Kashmir, the Liberation War of 1971, the Tamil question in Sri Lanka, the stateless Biharis of Bangladesh, each has its own substantial literature, its own competing accounts, its own political stakes. This course focuses on these instances and asks what they have in common. What are the patterns that help explain why so many communities in post-colonial South Asia face conflict around belonging and their citizenship status.

This course moves between theory and case study. We begin with foundational questions about nationalism, colonial knowledge, and the construction of difference, and we build toward a set of contemporary cases that illuminate how postcolonial states manage and produce “internal others”. These cases include the Partition violence of 1947 and 1971; the ongoing conflict in Kashmir; the systematic use of documentation regimes to strip citizenship from Bengali-speaking populations in Assam and the statelessness of Urdu-speaking Biharis in Bangladesh and Bengali speakers in Pakistan.

Throughout, students will be asked to think across scales: from the rhetoric of nationalist politicians to the experience of a family that cannot register the birth of a child because they lack the right document; from the broad structures of colonial boundary-drawing to the intimate violence of being told, in the country where you were born, that you are a foreigner. The course draws on postcolonial theory, critical citizenship studies, and scholarship on migration and border regimes, alongside historical and ethnographic case studies.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

In this course students will develop the ability to:

• Critically evaluate concepts and frameworks for understanding South Asian conflict including “communalism, “ethnonationalism” and “sectarianism” by situating them within colonial and postcolonial histories of knowledge production.
• Apply postcolonial and critical citizenship theory to specific case studies of nationalist violence and exclusion in South Asia.
• Recognize the stakes of scholarly representation by reflecting on the ethical dimensions of writing about violence and displacement.
• Develop analytical writing skills in order to construct clear, evidence-based arguments about film and world politics in their written work.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

All readings will be available electronically and hyperlinked through the course Canvas page. You will not be required to buy any textbook for this course.