Course Instructors: Arvind Rajagopal (Media, Culture and Communication) Robert J.C. Young (English and Comparative Literature)

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1 Fall 2008 Graduate Seminar Decolonization and its Aftermath: Globalization from Below E and G T 0330PM 0530PM 14UP 1FL (14 University Place, 1st floor) Course Instructors: Arvind Rajagopal (Media, Culture and Communication) Robert J.C. Young (English and Comparative Literature) The advent of 20 th C. decolonization challenged the way in which world history had been conceived for four centuries, as centered upon the tiny landmass of Western Europe, rather than say, as plural and polycentric. The former view made it difficult to understand how the majority of the world's population mattered to history at all. With the onset of decolonization after the end of World War I, the world began to be seen, first through the lens of the nation, and secondly, as an extensive set of interconnections, where seemingly remote events could have major effects across countries. This course will combine a survey of select decolonization movements with analyses of the transformations from anticolonial nationalism through postcolonial developmentalism to the contemporary new world order. The course will consider decolonization in two senses: as the historical achievement of independence in former colonies, and, as a communicational concept illuminating socio-political change. Therefore, in addition to historical and theoretical literature, this course will draw on literature, cinema and other media sources to explore the significance of decolonization in the 20 th C and beyond. The aftermath of the Cold War and the failure of non-alignment in the global South has been marked by the rise of religious and market fundamentalism as well as the emergence of a New World Order. It is increasingly obvious that decolonization has not brought all the freedoms it promised. Rather, it has enabled a deeper infusion of metropolitan technologies of governance, that would have been inhibited if erstwhile colonial structures had remained in place. Nevertheless, there are numerous unforeseen outcomes of the partial but increasing deinstitutionalization of regulatory systems. These are conventionally referred to in terms of democratization, consumer choice and

2 the new mobility of goods and persons. At the same time, questions of politics begin to move beyond the purview of the state, and pose problems that are also opportunities for democratization. This course will address a) the persistent legacies of colonization, as well as b) the political status of decolonization, as an initiative that inaugurates new futures, while remaining agnostic about its material outcomes. We will consider decolonization in the historical context of postcolonial development as well as retrospectively, in terms of the new world order, the clash of fundamentalisms, and rise of political violence that we witness today. Course Requirements Participants will be required to participate actively in class discussions and make class presentations on the readings. They will write a 5 page midterm research paper, and a final research paper of pages that can be a development of the midterm paper. The class size will have no more than 25 students. Grade Breakdown: Class Participation and class presentations: 25% Midterm research paper 25% Final research paper 50% What follows is a thematic outline for the course, with key and secondary readings under each heading. PART 1: Decolonization: Prelude and Advent Themes we will consider in the first part of the course include: the moral and political imagination of decolonization; writings of postcolonial nationalist leaders and the projects of nation-building and citizen-formation that these leaders undertook, and the development of postcolonial infrastructure. The term 'decolonization' covers a range of very different phenomena, from peaceful transfers of power to violent revolutions; as such there can be no simple account of it. The term refers to the shift of legal and political sovereignty from former imperial powers to their erstwhile colonial subjects. But it also refers to a movement for moral and political justice, a declaration of the solidarity of the colonized, and a liberatory ideology that embraced even countries that were not formally colonized, such as China and Iran.

3 From the Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Countries in 1955 to Pan- Africanism and beyond, there arose a new imagination of personhood and of non-western development. It was led by an alliance of political leaders and educated intelligentsia arguing for an alternative model of development that avoided taking sides with either the capitalist or the socialist superpower. Instead they pursued national development through a cosmopolitan confederation that acknowledged a shared experience of colonial oppression, and strove for emancipation from this history. 1. Introduction and Historical Background: Sept 2 Vladimir Lenin, Report on the National and Colonial Question (1920) Congress of Peoples of the East, Baku, September Mao Zedong, Report on An Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927) On Contradiction (1937) Frantz Fanon, "Algeria Unveiled," from A Dying Colonialism (1960); pp ; New York: Monthly Review Press, Recommended Film to be viewed: Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966) : Paul Cammack, et al, Third World Politics: A Comparative Introduction, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993 (Chapter 5, Revolution, ) C.R. Hensman, ed., The Polemics of Revolt: From Gandhi to Guevara. London: Allen Lane, 1969.

4 Jan P. Nederveen Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale (London, Pluto Press, 1990) Steve J. Stern, Fedualism, Capitalism and the World-SystemImmanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World-Economy: Essays by Immanuel Wallerstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Robert J.C. Young, European Anti-colonialism, The Internationals. Parts II & III of Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, pp , Special Issue on Battle of Algiers, Interventions 9:3 (2007) 2. The Third World, Bandung and What Lay Behind It (1 week), Sept 9 Report of the Bandung Conference (extracts) Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. University Press of Mississippi, Foreword by Gunnar Myrdal. (excerpts) Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Legacies of Bandung: Decolonisation and the Politics of Culture," Economic and Political Weekly, November 12, William Pietz, The Post-colonialism of Cold War Discourse, Social Text Autumn 1988: Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995) (Chapter 2: The Problematization of Poverty: The Tale of Three Worlds and Development, 21-54) Nigel Harris, The End of the Third World. Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline of an Ideology, London: Pelican Books, 1987 (Preface, Chapter 1 Third Worldism, 11-29)

5 Robert J.C. Young, From Bandung to the Tricontinental, historein / ιστορειν, annual publication of the Cultural and Intellectual History Society, Athens, Greece, 5 (2005), Nationalists and Their Visions of Decolonization Sept 16, 23 September 16: Jawaharlal Nehru, "The importance of the national idea: changes necessary in India," from Chapter 10, The Discovery of India. 1985, pp Ho Chi Minh, "The path that led me to Leninism," from Ho Chi-Minh, Selected Articles and Speeches, ed. and intro. Jack Woddis, pp Sun Yat-sen, The Three Principles of the People tr. Frank W. Price, ed. L.T. Chen. Shanghai, China: China Committee, Institute of Pacific Relations Selections from Lecture 4, pp Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970, pp September 23: N'gugi wa Thiongo, Matigari: A Novel. Tr. Wangui Wa Goro. Africa World Press, Lu Xun, Preface, Diary of a Madman, and Ah Q, in Lu Xun, Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, tr. Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, PART 2: Postcolonial Development and the Makings of a New World Order The second part of the course considers how the influence of anticolonial mobilization mutated in the postcolonial period, as the utopian hopes faded and a new world order began to take shape with the end of the Cold War; the rise of political and religious violence; the emergence of a (contested) global neoliberal consensus, and of debates over secular selfhood and religious fundamentalism.

6 Decades after the achievement of decolonization, it continues to be invoked as a utopian moment in non-western politics, and requires to be adequately understood, even if contemporary events lead us to question the nostalgia surrounding decolonization. In retrospect, it is clear that postcolonial development aimed to make official forms of nationalism dominant even as contestation from below grew. The historiography of decolonization has also been dominated by scholars sympathetic to top-down perspectives generated by postcolonial leaders. Unwittingly, Cold War concerns of isolating zones of East-West influence and viewing the superpower conflict as the overarching frame for understanding global affairs has continued to influence scholarship well past the end of the Cold War. Against this tendency, recent postcolonial scholarship has emphasized the extent to which colonialism was not only a matter of sovereignty, but as well, of institutions and modes of knowledge that endured past independence, even as nationalists tried to undo colonialism's effects. We should note here some of internal contradictions new nations had to work through. The raison d'etre of colonial governance was the racial and cultural incapacity of the colonized to govern themselves. Colonial rulers regarded native conditions as uncivilized and as requiring improvement, while forbidding citizenship and the attendant rights of self-improvement to colonial subjects. Anticolonial movements responded by conceiving of an alternative community, located in the "national state" (as Partha Chatterjee has termed it) that was meant to uplift the community it stood for. The form of representation was electoral democracy, but the means of upliftment was often through organizations and systems of understanding derived from colonial experience. Decolonization thus reproduced a colonial logic at its center, even as it moved past colonialism. 4. Postcolonial Development and its critiques (2 weeks): Sept 30 Ozay Mehmet, Westernizing the Third World. The Eurocentricity of Economic Development Theories. London: Routledge (Chapter 1, Westernizing the Third World, 1-25) Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard eds. International Development and

7 the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 (pp. 1-93) Rudolf Mrazek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002 (Chapters 1& 2). October 7: [excerpt tba]timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Part 1: State Projects of Legibility and Simplification. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, pp James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development," Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Part V: "Instrumenteffects of a "development" project." Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp Film: Weex Dunx and the Quota: Plucking Rural Democracy in Senegal (prod. & dir. Jesse Ribot, 2007). S. Charusheela, ed. Postcolonialism Meets Economics (Economics As Social Theory). New York: Routledge, Akhil Gupta, "Blurred boundaries: The discourse of corruption, the culture of politics and the Imagined state," American Ethnologist, vol. 22, no. 2, May 1995, pp Paul Harrison, Inside the Third World, London: Penguin, 1979, new ed October 14 Columbus Day. No class. MIDTERM RESEARCH PAPER DUE OCTOBER The Formation of National Subjects (2 weeks): Oct 21, 28

8 October 21: Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, Princeton October 28: Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press, Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anticolonial Imagination. London and New York: Verso, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press, Culture and Everyday Life (1 week) November 4: Julia Elyachar, Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development and the State in Cairo Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony. Tr. A.M. Berrett, Murray Last, Steven Rendell, Janet Roitman. Berkeley: University of California Press, (Chap 2 On Private, Indirect Government, and Chap 3 On the Aesthetics of Vulgarity) Recommended Film: Xala (dir. Ousmane Sembene, 1975). Jyotirindra Das Gupta, Language Conflict and National Development: Group Politics and National Language Policy in India (Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies, UC Berkeley) Berkeley: U. Of California Press,

9 1970. Stuart Hall, Old and New Identities. Old and New Ethnicities, in Anthony E. King, ed., Culture, Globalization and the World-System. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991, N'gugi Wa Thiongo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann, Mark Sanders, Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton University Press, Religious Nationalism and Postcolonial Development (1 week): Nov 11 Michel Foucault, Iran: The Spirit of a World Without Spirit, in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings Tr. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman. London, UK Routledge, 1990, pp Olivier Roy, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East or Globalised Islam (Extract) Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public In India. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, Film: Leila (dir. Dariush Mehrjui, 1996) Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Patriotic and Matriotic Nationalists, in his Refashioning Orientalism: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp Charles Hirschkind, Islam, Nationalism and Audition, and The Ethics of

10 Listening, in his The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, pp Bobby Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books, Popular Violence and State Complicity (1 week), Nov 18 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press, Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Picador, 1999 Derek Gregory and Allen Pred, eds., Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence. New York: Routledge, 2006 Antjie Krog, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow, and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. Three Rivers Press, Neil McMaster, Torture: from Algiers to Abu Ghraib, Race and Class, 46(2), 2005, pp James T. Siegel, A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter-Revolution Today. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, New World Order (1 week), Nov 25 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005 Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed. Finance, Globalization and Welfare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

11 University Press, New ed. Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global. Internationalism in Distress. New York: New York University Press, Kavaljit Singh, The Globalisation of Finance: A Citizen s Guide. London: Zed Books, 1999 Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton, Weeks Class Discussion; Review.