Comparative Colonialism Preliminary Examination
Spring 2009
Answer one question from each section. You must do a total of three (3)
questions. Be sure each essay has a clear line of argument, addresses as many
dimensions of the question as possible, and offers relevant, persuasive evidence from
specific secondary sources wherever appropriate. Good luck!
Section I
A. What is comparative colonialism? How is it most often practiced? What are the stated
goals of the field? How has the field been shaped by feminist attention to women and
gender as analytical categories in the last two decades? Discuss the most influential
scholars, their methodological approaches, and the impact they have had on the histories
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
B. Compare and contrast the work done on the French and British colonial experiences
around the concepts of creolization, the body and sexuality. To what extent has
historiography followed the flag (and the archive) in these areas, and how can creative
borrowing across colonial sites enrich scholarship on race and gender in imperial history?
Section II
A. In recent years, the field of comparative colonialism has devoted a great deal of
attention to detailing the historiography of difference. What are some of the most
common elements under discussion in these works? In what ways did the Enlightenment
contribute to modern notions of difference? How does attention to those elements help or
hinder our understanding of the colonial ideal and colonial practice in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries?
B. You have been invited to develop and teach a fifteen-week survey course on
“European Imperialism, 1750-1850” at the 100 level. While your department chair has
given you a great deal of flexibility in terms of how to structure the course, she would
like to see “non-Western” histories fully incorporated into the survey's approach and into
as many of its central themes as possible. In a carefully constructed course proposal,
identify the three major pedagogical goals for the course and then go on to discuss the
central themes that will be addressed over the weeks. Discuss three or four key readings
that you will require of your undergraduate students and explain their significance to the
intellectual architecture of the course.
Section III
A. While scholars of colonialism have long recognized the way racial categories were
complicit in the maintenance and exercise of colonial power, there has been far less
attention paid to the emergence of whiteness. Your dissertation sets the stage for the
emergence of a gendered white identity in the eighteenth-century French Caribbean. How
would you define whiteness? What specific cultural, social, and economic imperatives
did whiteness demand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Why are questions of
gender and sexuality at the forefront of studies of whiteness in colonial cultures? How do
questions of creolization and ethnicity impact the formation of whiteness in colonial
cultures? How do the imperatives of whiteness change over time and space?
B. What is valuable about a specifically historical--as opposed to sociological,
ethnographic or literary--approach to postcoloniality? Or are historical methods perforce
intersectional and/or interdisciplinary? What is at stake in the application of historical
method however you define it for postcolonial studies?
Preliminary Examination
Colonialism/Postcolonialsm
Answer one question from each section. You must do a total of three (3) questions.
Be sure each essay has a clear line of argument, addresses as many dimensions of the
question as possible, and offers relevant, persuasive evidence from specific secondary
sources wherever appropriate. Good luck!
Part I
A. Frantz Fanon and Edward Said set the stage for thinking through race,
colonialism, anti-colonialism, and postcolonialism. How have ideas of identity,
power, and nation developed in scholarship from the 1960s and 70s to the
present? How has post-colonial thinking changed the ways in which US
historians conceptualize the relationship between race and space?
B. According to Frantz Fanon, “Europe is . . . the creation of the Third World.” Has the
making of the United States as a nation been similarly contingent? Discuss models of the
nation on offer in the historiography of the last quarter century with a view to their
applicability across diverse geographical spaces and temporal frames. What is at stake in
theorizing the nation as fragment, as processual, as fluid, as in-the-making? Is that a
sufficient challenge to claims of US exceptionalism and universalism?
Part II
A. In 1983, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote that “The subaltern cannot speak.
There is no virtue in global laundry lists with ‘woman’ as a pious item.’ How
has her work responded to the scholarship of “Third World Feminists” and the
Subaltern Studies group? How has gender as a category of analysis been
important to the development of postcolonial theory? How have embodiment
and affect been read along geographies of scale?
B. What is the right and proper weight to give analyses of the body when historicizing
imperial, global and/or transnational histories in the context of post/colonial modernity?
What proportionate role does structural/material analysis play in shaping such sweeping
histories? And what obligation if any do we have to the question of agency as an
embodied phenomenon when rethinking global and local narratives?
Part III
A. If you were to base a World History survey from 1890 to the present on
postcolonial theories, around which issues would you structure your syllabus?
Which postcolonial writings would influence the construction of your course
and your analysis of events? What texts would you choose to teach? What
would be the rationale for your pedagogical choices?
B. What is valuable about a specifically historical--as opposed to sociological,
ethnographic or literary--approach to postcoloniality? Or are historical methods perforce
intersectional and/or interdisciplinary? What is at stake in the application of historical
method however you define it for postcolonial studies?