Studies I-III Globalization
Colonialism has profoundly shaped the modern experience. It continues to influence the stories of how we live in the world and the web of connections between people and nations today. Many contemporary questions about existence and idealism have been shaped against the hard edges and tools of the colonial experience. “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” This is the title of Paul Gauguin’s 1897 painting tracing the human journey against the landscape of colonial Tahiti. Gauguin engages three questions from his Catholic European catechism and illustrates them with motifs taken from his Tahitian sojourn. By the time Gauguin arrived on the island, it had been part of the British and French colonial project for over a hundred years. For this course, Gauguin’s painting raises not simply these first three central questions, but a series of other questions about the relationship between colonialism and modernity. This first year honors sequence course begins in Venice and looks East and West, moving through time and space to examine the ways that colonialism has shaped how we understand ourselves and the modern world, informing not only who we are, but where we are going.
The first year of this sequence uses Gauguin’s questions to structure the narrative of colonial expansion and its aftermath. Using an interdisciplinary range of primary texts, we move from cosmologies of colonialism to the contemporary experiences of the legacy of colonialism before ending with the question of “where are we going” in our newly mapped globe. Students will progress through a series of skill-building exercises in active reading and effective note-taking, as well as intensive writing assignments focused on summary of argument, explication, and identifying intertextual connections.
I: “Where do we come from?” Modern Cosmologies
We begin in the first quarter by examining how colonialism worked both in the "East" and in the "West." Reading primary sources including journal excerpts, early maps, legal decrees, a play, slave narratives, and poetry we will explore the ways in which colonial discourse fundamentally influenced the map of the modern world and the multiple constructions of race, gender and stories.
Core Texts
Zhou, A Record of Cambodia
Shakespeare, Othello
Letters of Columbus
Equiano, Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
de la Cruz, Selected poems OR selections from Lady Mary Wortley's Turkish Letters
Wheatley, Selected poems
Said, Orientalism (Chapter 1)
II: “Who are we?” Modern Identities
In Winter quarter, we take up the issue of postcolonial identity in a series of novels, poems and autobiographies. In taking up “who are we” we examine how people have responded to colonial oppression and postcolonial resistance.
Core Texts
Fukuzawa, "Civilization and Enlightenment"
Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera
Phillips, The Nature of Blood
Hambata, Crested Kimono
Satrapi, Persepolis
Said, Orientalism (Chapter 2)
III: Where are we going? Global Future(s)
In spring quarter, we discuss how colonialism and the postcolonial experience continue to shape our future pathways. We continue in our readings of imagined utopias and dystopias that are fundamentally informed by our recent past and our global present.
Core Texts
Mann, 1941 (Part 3)
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains OR Norberg-Hodge, Ancient Futures
Said, Orientalism (Chapter 3)
Aydin, "Between Occidentalism and the Global Left: Islamist Critiques of the West in Turkey"
