A Global History of the Black Atlantic 4219-RS245
A week-by-week course outline will be provided to the students before the class begins. The major themes we will address are as follows: the relationship between slavery/violence and modernity; history/science from below; “writing against culture”; the people without history; transnational history; relationship between gender, class and race; the origins of capitalism; post-human perspective on the nature/culture dichotomy; political ecologies; relationship between anthropology and "development".
Type of course
proseminars
Prerequisites (description)
Learning outcomes
By the end of the course, students will have:
- a sound understanding of the research methods in contemporary social anthropology
-in-depth knowledge of anthropological body of research on the Americas
- an command of major theoretical concepts in today's social anthropology
SKILLS.
By the end of the course, students will have:
- developed academic writing skills
- developed critical thinking skills
- developed in-class discussion skills
- developed a skill of an analysis of an academic text
Assessment criteria
The final grade will comprise of attendance and participatin in class discussions (10%), an in-class presentation of a prescribed texts (20%) and a final research paper (70%).
Bibliography
A week-by-week course outline will be provided to the students before the class begins. Here are some of the texts:
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance, Ithaca: Cornel UP, 1991.
Edward Baptist, The Half Has Not Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History, Durham: Duke UP, 2005.
Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
John and Jane Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa, “Anthropological Forum”, Volume 22, Issue 2, 2012, pp. 113-131.
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 years, New York: Melville House, 2012.
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press.
Sid Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, London: Penguin, 1986.
Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail, Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 2015.
Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution, London: Verso, 2018.
Michael Taussig, The Genesis of Capitalism amongst a South American Peasantry: Devil's Labor and the Baptism of Money (abridged).
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism (abridged)
Eric Wolf, Pathways of Power: Building an Anthropology of the Modern World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: