| Unit name | Theorizing Violence: Colonial Encounters and Anticolonial Reactions |
|---|---|
| Unit code | MODLM0025 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | M/7 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Dr. Hassett |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | School of Modern Languages |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This course examines theoretical and empirical critiques of violence across several cultural and geographic contexts, and from a wide range of disciplines, including literary studies, history, philosophy, and political theory.
We will engage classic European texts on the philosophy of violence as well as reactions to colonial violence across the colonized world. We will also revisit political theories of violence in order to examine their relevance to understanding violence in the modern and contemporary periods. Comparing the experience of violence across a wide variety of colonial and colonizing contexts, this course tests the limits of the modern state’s monopoly on violence, while suggesting how literature and cultural artefacts generate resistance to state coercion.
Students will be encouraged to reflect critically on the range of texts pertaining to the history and theory of violence, while also engaging in cross-cultural comparison and practicing interdisciplinary methodologies. The comparative and interdisciplinary approach of this course will train students in the methodologies most relevant to the MA in Comparative Cultures in the School of Modern Languages, but the course content will be of relevance to students in other MA programmes.
1) Students will develop scholarly perspectives on a wide range of reflections on violence and will become able to situate these works within a broader intellectual tradition
2) Students will develop a sophisticated cross-cultural understanding of violence and of global imperial history from multiples points of view
3) Students will develop the ability to apply key insights from critical theory to the contemporary moment
4) Students will refine their abilities in comparative textual analysis
5) Students will acquire a sophisticated understanding of global intellectual history and political theory
6) Students will develop the tools to conduct further research into the theory of violence across world cultures
2 hour seminar (with some lecturing) per week
3,000 word coursework essay (60%), testing ILOs 1-6
One 2,000 word commentary assignment involving discussion of two or more course readings (40%), testing ILOs 1-6.
Walter Benjamin, “The Critique of Violence”
Usuman dan Fodio, Discourse on the necessity of hijra, ed. Fatḥī Ḥasan Maṣrī (Khartoum: Khartoum University Press , 1978)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. Translated by Constance Farrington. (New York, Grove Press, 1961)
Sayyid Qutb, The Sayyid Qutb reader: selected writings on politics, religion, and society, ed. Albert J. Bergesen (London: Routledge, 2007)
Max Weber, Weber: Political Writings, eds. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Arendt, On Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970)
