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.
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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! |
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August 2015
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