WINTER 2011 COURSE ANNOUNCEMENT
INT 500/INT 388/PAX 386
POSTCOLONIALISM MEETS INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
DR SHIERA MALIK
T/Th 4:20-5:50 pm
This course functions as an introduction to studies of colonialism and postcolonialism
that exist within International Relations (IR). Work in this area challenges the
discipline of IR in that it often takes a critical approach to concepts that we take for
granted in IR. This course introduces students to the main threads of this scholarly
challenge and its attendant concepts – Other, alterity, subalternity, subjectivity,
knowledge, discourse, and power. Students will also become familiar with the forms
of logic used to tell a different story of IR. The course begins with Said’s Orientalism,
a landmark text in the sense that it started a critique of the West’s gaze on the East
and spawned a vigorously contested and highly complex debate to this day. The
course incorporates material that engages with Said’s text and builds upon it. The
assigned readings come at this topic from different angles bringing in concepts of
gender, identity, art, primitive, colonization, modernity, and history.
By the end of this course, students will understand the set of concepts above and be
able to use them. The readings are very difficult and will expand students’ command
of the complex theoretical language that can be indispensible in developing complex
explanations of international events. The research paper will give students the
chance to develop an analysis on a topic of their own interest. Finally, students in this
course will develop their own critical lenses; specifically, the course will yield a
perspective on decolonizing methodologies.
INT 500-201: TOPICS IN GLOBAL
CULTURAL ANALYSIS
Reading List:
1. Edward Said (1978). Orientalism. Vintage.
2. Timothy Mitchell (1988). Colonising Egypt. University of California Press
3. Immanuel Wallerstein (2006) European Universalism: the rhetoric of power. The
New Press.
4. V.Y. Mudimbe (1988). The Invention of Africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order
of knowledge. Indiana University Press
5. Aime Cesaire (2000). Discourse on Colonialism. Atlantic Monthly Press
6. Spivak, Gayatri (1988). ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds).
7. Mohanty, Chandra (1984). ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial
discourses.’ Reprinted in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (eds). Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1991.
We will read excerpts from the following texts:
1. Reina Lewis (1995). Gendering Orientalism: Race, femininity and representation.
London: Routledge.
2. Frederick Cooper (2005). Colonialism in Question: theory, knowledge, history.
University of California Press.