81961 - HISTORY OF COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL SPACES (1) (LM)

Conoscenze e abilità da conseguire

The course intends to provide a critical and interdisciplinary analysis of the policy and ideology of European colonial expansion between the opening of the Suez Canal (1869) and the outbreak of the First World War, a period characterized by unprecedented competition for overseas territorial acquisitions and the emergence in colonising countries of doctrines of racial superiority. Students will acquire a top-down and a bottom-up perspective on the process of ‘simplification’ registered in colonial contexts and will be required to adopt a comparative approach that takes on board the Middle East and other geographical contexts directly affected by colonial rule and conflicts, including and particularly African countries and India.

Contenuti

The first part of the course provides an analytical frame to imperialism, colonialism and post-colonial studies, – a field of studies largely dominated by literary scholars and much less by historians – uncovering contacts, developments, and cultural and political convergences that unite disparate regions subject to imperial or colonial rule. Much attention will be given to the Indian and African contexts, as well as to several key-concepts commonly adopted to approach a number of post-colonial spaces, including “tribes”, “sects”, “races”, “minorities”.

The second part of the course will focus on the Middle East. We will assess what the region is currently experiencing by challenging a hegemonic discourse (“medievalization” of the region) and observing, also through bottom-up perspectives, the historical process through which local complex and multifaceted realities have been simplified, homogeneized, and denied in their historical continuities. This aim will be accomplished by focusing on the “long nineteenth century” of the Middle East, – framed by the late Donald Quataert between Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt (1798) and the beginning of the League of Nations’ mandates (1922) – that has also been dubbed by a number of scholars as the “reform century”: from the early reforms (1808-1839) under Sultan Mahmud II until the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.

Testi/Bibliografia

Attending students will prepare the readings following the schedule which will be distributed at the beginning of the course. All teaching materials for attending students will be made available to students in a dedicated page of dropbox.

The following reading list is divided into 15 parts, each corresponding to one lesson. Students are requested to prepare the required readings carefully, in order to be able to participate to class discussions.

Additionally, each week one student (in turn) will be asked to prepare a short oral presentation (no longer than 15 minutes) on one source included in the reading list (see below). The list of presentations will be agreed during the first lesson.

Lesson 1: Overview of the course (presentation of the syllabus; audiovisual tools; hashtags; journals; archives) and preliminary inputs

Suggested reading: E. Soler I Lecha (ed.), Reconceptualizing Orders, in «Menara», November 2016, pp. 7-16. Available on-line: http://www.menaraproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/menara_cp_1-4.pdf

Lesson 2: Framing Imperialism, Colonialism and Post-Colonialism: on the Relevance of Histoire Croisée

Required reading: R. JC Young, Postcolonial Remains, in “New Literary History””, 43(1), Winter 2012, pp. 19-41 and D. Kennedy, Imperial History and Post-Colonial Theory, in James D. Le Sueur (ed.), The Decolonization Reader, Routledge, New York 2003, pp. 10-20.

Presentation delivered by one student: A. Loomba, Situating Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, 1998, Routledge, London 1998, pp. 19-39.

Lesson 3: Identifying and discussing stereotypes on the Middle East and beyond

Required reading: B. Milton-Edwards, Contemporary Politics in the Middle East, Polity Press, Cambridge 2015, introduction.

Presentation delivered by one student: E. Said, Orientalism, Pantheon, New York 1978, Introduction & L. Kamel, The impact of “Biblical Orientalism”, «New Middle Eastern Studies», 4, 2014, pp. 1-15. Available on-line: http://www.brismes.ac.uk/nmes/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/NMES2014Kamel.pdf

Lesson 4: Islam in colonial and post-colonial spaces

Required reading: T. Sonn, Islam, Wiley-Blackwell, New York 2015, chapter 1.

Presentation delivered by one student: S. Ahmed, What is Islam?, Princeton UP, Princeton 2015, chapter 1.

Lesson 5: India, Africa and the Middle East in a comparative perspective

Required reading: L. Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, Univ. of Texas Press, Austin 2011, chapter 2.

Presentation delivered by one student: N.W. Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, Heinemann, Portsmouth 1986, chapter 1.

Lesson 6: Forging a Usable Past: the Rising of the “Indian Empire”

Required reading: M. Fárek, D. Jalki, S. Pathan, P. Shah (eds.), Western Foundations of the Caste System, Palgrave, London 2017, pp. 1-29.

Presentation delivered by one student: A. Shodhan, Decolonising the Partition of British India, 1947, The Historian, Summer 2017, pp. 20-25, and E. Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge UP, Cambridge 1983, introduction.

Watching and discussing the documentary: “British Occupation of India”

Lesson 7: The Ottoman Empire: toward the “Eastern Question”

Required reading: W. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, Westview Press, Boulder 2012, chapter 4, and L. Kamel, Imperial Perceptions of Palestine: British Influence and Power in Late Ottoman Times, 1854-1923, I.B. Tauris, London and New York 2015, pp. 52-57.

Presentation delivered by one student: B. Tucker, The Eastern Question, in Bible and the Sword, New York University Press, New York 1956, chapter 9, or N.F. Hermes, Be(yond)fore Orientalism in N.F. Hermes, The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture, Palgrave, New York 2012, pp. 1-10.

Lesson 8: World War I and the Post-Ottoman Order

Required reading: W. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, Westview Press, Boulder 2012, chapter 9.

Presentation delivered by one student: B.Milton-Edwards, Colonial Rule, in Contemporary Politics in the Middle East, Polity Press, Cambridge 2015, pp. 26-37.

Lesson 9: The Clash of Nationalisms

Required reading: L. Kamel, Imperial Perceptions of Palestine: British Influence and Power in Late Ottoman Times, 1854-1923, I.B. Tauris, London and New York 2015, chapter 4.

Presentation delivered by one student: Y. Zerubavel, Desert and Settlement, in J. Baruch (ed.), Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, Ashgate, Aldershot 2008, chapter 4.

Watching and discussing the documentary: “1913: Seeds of Conflict”.

Lesson 10: Sealed identities and the "Balfour pattern"

Required reading: L. Kamel, Imperial Perceptions of Palestine: British Influence and Power in Late Ottoman Times, 1854-1923, I.B. Tauris, London and New York 2015, chapter 6 and B. Avishai, The Balfour Declaration Century, in “The New Yorker”, Nov. 2, 2017, available at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-balfour-declaration-century

Presentation delivered by one student: N. Caplan, The Israel-Palestine Conflict. Contested Histories, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden 2009, chapter 1

Lesson 11: The Mandates’ System and the Wilsonian approach to self-determination

Required reading: E. Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1973, chapter 5.

Presentation delivered by one student:

Al-Rustom, H., "Rethinking the 'Post-Ottoman': Anatolian Armenians as an Ethnographic Perspective", in S. Altorki (ed.), A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, Wiley Blackwell, Chichester 2015, pp. 452-472, or C. Howard-Ellis, The Origin Structure and Working of the League of Nations, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1929, chapter 3.

Lesson 12: The Struggle for Independence:

Required reading: W. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, Westview Press, Boulder 2012, chapters 11 and 12.

Presentation delivered by one student: A. Al-Arian, Muslim Brotherhood Between Past and Present. Available on-line: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/02/muslim-brotherhoodtrump-terror-list-170201090317237.html

Lesson 13: The Kurdish “exception”, between Past and Present

Required reading: D. McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, I.B. Tauris, London 2000, pp. 1-17.

Presentation delivered by one student: H. Özoğlu, Politics of Memory: Kurdish Ethnic Identity and the Role of Collective Forgetting, in G. Stansfield, M. Shareef (eds.), The Kurdish Question Revisited, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2017 and S.M. Torelli, Kurdistan: an Invisible Nation, Ispi, Milan 2016, chapter 1, available at: http://www.ispionline.it/it/pubblicazione/kurdistaninvisible-nation-15350.

Lesson 14: Borders, States, Nations in the post-colonial Middle East

Required reading: L. Kamel, Artificial Nations? The Sykes-Picot and the Islamic State’s narratives in a historical perspective, «Diacronie Studi di Storia Contemporanea», 25(1), 2016, pp. 1-20.

Presentation delivered by one student: F. Dundar, "Statisquo", Brandeis University's Crown Center for Middle East Studies, Boston 2012, paper 7, pp. 1-18, available at: http://www.brandeis.edu/crown/publications/cp/CP7.pdf. Alternatively, it is possible to opt for: S. Shields, Mosul Questions: Economy Identity and Annexation, in R.S. Simon (ed.), The Creation of Iraq 1914-1921, Columbia UP, New York 2004, chapter 3.

Lesson 15: Ethnic and religious “minorities” in the colonial and post-colonial MENA

Required reading: B. White, The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2011, introduction.

Presentation delivered by one student: U. Makdisi, The Problem of Sectarianism in the Middle East in an Age of Western Hegemony, in N. Hashemi-D. Postel (eds.), Sectarianization, Hurst, London 2017, chapter 1. Alternatively, it is possible to opt for: L. Kamel, Reshuffling the Middle East: a Historical and Political Perspective, «The International Spectator», 51(3), 2016, pp. 132-141.

Metodi didattici

Frontal lectures, students' presentations, use of media, class discussion.

Students' presentations should be organized in the following way: 1) present the thesis that the reading proposes; 2) summarize the main arguments used by the author to support the thesis; 3) present your comments on the article; 4) raise a number of questions to be discussed in class.

Modalità di verifica e valutazione dell'apprendimento

Grades in this course will be based on the following assignments:

Class participation 40%

Oral presentations 20%

Final examination 40%

Grading criteria for participation:

• Demonstration of reading assigned materials prior to class
• Contribution to discussion
• Ability to critically analyze the readings

Grading criteria for oral presentation:

• Well-organized and clear structure (the presentation has a clear Intro, body, and conclusion)
• Demonstration of understanding the main ideas/thesis that the article intends to propose
• Raise critical comments to readings
• Raise questions to be discussed in the class

Grading criteria for final exam:

• 25 multiple choice & 5 open questions: all taken from the required readings

Strumenti a supporto della didattica

Frontal lectures and group discussions will be supported by Power Point presentations aimed to show visual and textual materials. Students are encouraged to keep up with current events by regularly reading newspapers, periodicals and other materials related to India, as well as African and Middle Eastern countries.

Link ad altre eventuali informazioni

https://unibo.academia.edu/LorenzoKamel

Orario di ricevimento

Consulta il sito web di Lorenzo Kamel