First of all, I can't stress enough how important it is that you all fill out the Ecafe review. If us instructors are to get any better, and if our departments are to have any grounds on which to hire us, we need these inputs from the students. PLEASE, if you haven't, log in to eCAFE at http://www.hawaii.edu/ecafe and fill it out. Your reviews are entirely anonymous and I don't see them until after I have entered your grades...
Thank you for your responses to Butler. I detect a certain fatigue or lack of rigorousness in the reading of some of you... I hope its due to some really good final papers being written. I look forward to reading them. Remember, they are due tomorrow Tuesday at midnight Hawaii time. And at this point, I would like to say thank you again for taking this course. I sincerely hope you feel it has been worthwhile, and that you have learned something, or perhaps that you have become more confused about something, which is just as much a type of learning. I have enjoyed our online discussions! Thanks for your final thoughts on Chamayou. It's amazing how many different examples of contemporary hunting practices you all came up with.
The book for our last week of reading is difficult. But good. So I guess it's sort of like the rest of the books we have read... I have put this book at the end because I really think it sums everything up with the notion of "grievability." It also takes the topic of our course and holds it up against the role of media, something we haven't discussed yet. I'm interested to see what you think. Please read the introduction and chapters 1, 2 and 3. (page 1-135). FInal papers: I have now added a detailed description of what I expect from your final papers. It is right here on the website under "assignments". When this week is over, there is only a few more days before your paper is due, so I strongly recommend you to begin researching and writing it now if you haven't already. Final papers are due August 12. Now is a good time to start thinking about your topic. The paper is supposed to be a research paper about a topic relating to the course. You have to do research by yourself and quote materials we haven't read in class in your paper. You are most welcome to pass ideas for topics by me. I'll write more about the final paper next week.
I am positively surprised with how much you all got out of Chamayou. That is great!
This week, read the rest of Chamayou (there are only 40 pages left), and then read a review essay I have written about Chamayou's book along with a book about French policing called "Enforcing Order". My hope is that reading this essay will help you grasp Chamayou even better, while also showing a good example of where Chamayou's book is applicable in today's political world. "Enforcing Order" is an ethnography of urban policing in France, and is as such an exploration of national politics. However, as these national politics are very much shaped by French colonialism of the past as well as contemporary European immigration issues, I think the book is relevant to our course as well (just to avoid any confusion: you will only be introduced to this book through a review of it...). I look forward to reading your reactions. Thanks for great reactions on the neoliberalism/neocolonialism readings. It seems a lot of you found them interesting.
The next two weeks we will read a book called "Manhunts." It is a short but dense book. For this week, read the introduction and chapters 1 through 8 (pages 7-59 in the pdf). Next week we will read the rest of the book along with a review I have written of it. The book is a "philosophical history". My guess is that you will enjoy the history part and find the philosophy part difficult. So I say my usual thing: Read lightly over the parts you don't get. Focus on the parts you get. See what you can get out of this reading. There aren't a lot of pages for you to read, so there's time to read things more than once if you almost get it and want to get it. The book tells a lot of the history we've already gone over in this class from a different viewpoint, namely that of hunting. I think its a brilliant book, I hope you will too... Thanks for your reactions to Balibar and Wallerstein. There was a lot there. Again, I hope you read each others reactions and responses and my responses to everyone. This week, the responses I have written to Kaitlyn and Natanya I think are particularly helpful to everyone, but a lot of you had a good grasp of what was going on in these texts and how they fit into our class theme.
This week, we turn to the globalization part of international relations. The readings are chapter 1 in David Harvey's history of Neoliberalism. It's pretty technical. My hope is that it will help you understand what neoliberalism is. The other reading for this week is a paper I wrote for a graduate class in 2011. It gives you the history of the term neocolonialism and explains how neocolonialism and neoliberalism fit together, and then it tears Elisabeth Gilbert's novel "Eat Pray Love" apart. You can see the last part of my paper as an example of an analysis of where we find these inequality-structures in places we don't expect. Some would say I am being unfair in this analysis of Gilbert's novel and thats fine, they have a point. I had to make bold claims to make the paper work. You can agree or not agree, I just hope the paper helps you sort out some history and some concepts. And then I hope that something I wrote while I was a master's student is easier for you to comprehend than a french philosopher. I did a lot of research for that paper, so it's a quick way for you all to learn what I learned in that process. Apart from a few exceptions, it seems you had trouble with The Least of All Possible Evils. Almost all responses this week are sloppy and seem to be based on either a lack of actually reading the text or a lack of comprehending it. I'll take my part of the responsibility for this rather sad outcome, I could have provided you with a reading guide instead of thinking that this book spoke for itself. I get the sense that some of you gave up upon finding the introduction to the book difficult. That's sad, because I think the book gets easier and has so much to offer later on.
The book plays a role in the analytical essay, and I hope some of you will take that opportunity to read part of the book again or more thoroughly. Skip the introduction then, and focus perhaps on chapters 3 and 4 that are I think the most easily accessible. So apart from submitting the analytical essay this week (see instructions here on the website under "assignments"), you have a small amount of reading to react to. One essay from Balibar and one from Wallerstein. Balibar examines racism in its present manifestations, for example how it is ever present in the contemporary politics of immigration. Wallerstein writes about the construction of peoplehood, and also about the global axial division of labor as something based on racism. Both essays offer an analysis of the present that I think ties well into our readings so far. Both essays also briefly touch on the future that will come. I'm not sure I agree with their predictions and am interested to hear your take. Don't get put off by the references to theoretics you don't know. You can get the points regardless. I look forward to your reactions and your analytical essays! I won't say much about this book beforehand. When I read it the first time, I hadn't been introduced to it, but read it from cover to cover in five hours. I simply couldn't let it go, and what I learned from it lingered with me for a long time. I hope you will have a similar experience.
The general reading guide on this website applies to this reading also. For example, if you don't know Hannah Arendt at all (I didn't when I first read this book), that's okay, just let go of understanding the parts where her work plays a big role 100%, there is still so much to take away from this book. So yes - the whole book. It is a lot of pages, but quite a few pages are photos. One thing: Eyal Weizman is an architect. When you know that, you can see this in his work, but he still doesn't do what your mainstream architect does! Also: Instructions for the analytical essay, due July 10th (in two weeks) is now up here on the website. This week's book by Franz Fanon I think pairs really well with last week's book. Lindquist told us the big history, Fanon takes us into the mind of the colonized - a viewpoint that is quite rare unfortunately. And of course Fanon cannot speak for every subjugated person, as he well knows and also says. Nonetheless, this book is about the struggle of forming a black identity, when black identity has been so tainted - and defined - by colonial encounters.
You don't have to read the whole book. Read only the following: - Foreword to the 2008 edition by Ziauddin Sardar - Introduction - 1 The Negro and Language - 2 The Woman of Color and the White Man - 3 The Man of Color and the White Woman - 5 The Fact of Blackness - 8 By Way of Conclusion In many ways, the forward by Sardar works as a good introduction to Fanon and as a good reading guide to the book. Other than that I'd like you to think about how this book explains why it is impossible to go back to a pre-colonial situation. When the colonizers leave, the "freedom" they are able to grant is by no means freedom, because the very psychology of the colonized can't be freed, the colonial mind cannot be lifted in an instance. Again, the question becomes: How to form a (free) black identity? This also means there is a problematic relationship to history for those who have been colonized. Often times, a people will look to their history to determine their identity and their culture, but this option, Fanon thinks, is foreclosed for the formerly colonized peoples. Their history has been destroyed, and with that their identity. Fanon tries to get out of this deadlock in the conclusion. I look forward to your reactions! And remember, the Friday deadline for reactions to Fanon is also the deadline for comments on someone else's post from last week, so someone else's post about Lindquist. |
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August 2015
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