States, Empires, and Postcolonialism

SOC-STD 98PO Subject & Catalog Number

This seminar introduces major approaches to empires in social sciences, with a particular focus on the global and postcolonial turns and their critiques. We will discuss canonical works of postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and the Black Radical Tradition together with contemporary empirical work on empires. This seminar aims to 1) develop a comprehensive understanding of the conceptual toolkit of postcolonial thought and the Black Radical Tradition while addressing the sociopolitical contexts which gave rise to them, 2) compare postcolonial approaches to other major paradigms of anti-imperialist thought, and 3) survey approaches to empires and borderlands that do not conform to the categories of postcolonial thought. We will explore imperial legacies in social thought, political organization, and state formation from an interdisciplinary perspective. 

Some of the questions this seminar addresses are: How are racialization and empire related in different contexts? How can we apprehend the histories of (physical, epistemic, symbolic etc.) violence and extraction from a subaltern anti-imperial perspective? How do the metropoles and colonies relate to and constitute each other? Do empires learn from each other, and if so how? How do imperial relations structure contemporary politics, culture, and power relations? What forms does imperial domination and resistance against empire take? This is a junior tutorial.