Even though I no longer teach face to face classes, I’ve always loved lecturing. Here I want to share an introductory class lecture that covers colonialism. If you are a faculty member, please feel free to use this lecture in your classes. Please note that this lecture is about eight years old as I post this, so you will likely want to update it.
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Colonialism – an introductory lecture for an INTL 101 classRead More »
Last fall I assigned Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe in my “Foundations of Global Studies Theory” class. The book was very challenging for most students, and I ultimately decided that it might be more appropriate for a graduate level course. At the same time, the work is a foundational text in Postcolonial Studies, which seeks to examine the ways in which Western intellectual history continues to shape programs and expectations in less developed countries. Chakrabarty argues that Western theories are both “indispensable and inadequate.” Inherent to most Western social science theory is the concept of historicism; in other words, there is one evolutionary model that societies pass through, which also happens to be that of Europe. For this reason, most Western social theorists do not take religion seriously, nor do they necessarily question using Western concepts such as Marxism to understand the class consciousness of Indian workers. In this sense, Chakrabarty demonstrates the Eurocentrism that runs through Western social sciences. …
Book Review: Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing EuropeRead More »
I am fortunate to be on sabbatical this year, thanks to the generous support of the Ruth Landes Memorial Fund at the Reed Foundation. I am studying how colonialism impacted Algonquian peoples in Canada, particularly women, by examining a particular form of spirit transformation called the windigo. In some respects, I believe that windigo cases acted like the Salem witch trials, in that they created a record of a society under stress, in this case of its encounter with colonialism. Over the course of four centuries, different outside actors created narratives around the windigo in order to assert their power over Algonquian peoples. In my book, I’ll be using Algonquian oral narratives, fur-trade records, missionary accounts, court cases and psychological case files to consider how the French, English and Canadian states interacted with different Algonquian nations through time. …
Indigenous Peoples in International and Global StudiesRead More »
