HIST.F23

Focusing on contemporary and historical narratives, representations and theories about the ostensibly transparent and stable categories of "women and gender" "Britain and nation" and “modernity,” this course explores the ongoing production, circulation and refraction of discourses on not only gender and nation but also on race, empire and modernity since the mid-18th century. Assignments will incorporate visual and material as well as literary evidence and culture, and the course will consider the crystallization in this period of the discipline of history itself (and the practices that constitute and challenge it) as historically engendered.
This is a reading-, writing-, and discussion-intensive course. It aims, among other things, to enable students to develop their critical reading, analytical, expository and research skills, and the closely-articulated assignments are designed accordingly. Informed, active participation in class discussions is expected.

History 258: Themes in British Empire History
Imagining Indias
MW 2:40-4 Dalton 10

Professor Madhavi Kale office hours: TTh 3-4, F 10-12
Old Library 136 x6539 https:/calendly.com/f2020/office-hours


Mention of “India” may well conjure the image of a specific formation, with its capital roughly in the center and borders firmly drawn – or hatched and disputed. However, it would be well to remember the relative newness of that mapping, as well as what that map erases – well to remember that the map is a palimpsest under which many other stories and contours have been asserted, lived, denied, assumed, and refused.
This course proceeds from the assumption that the category of “India” (indeed, of any nation, people, place) is historically produced: not stable, not continuous, but constituted – politically, geographically, culturally – in specific contexts by specific actors using specific media, technologies and resources to varied ends. Temporally and thematically, the course focuses on the India constituted by British colonialism, for reasons that I hope will become apparent as the semester proceeds. A central concern of the course is to cast into relief the contested terrain that is historical scholarship and to try to understand, in the contexts of India, what is at stake in the arguments and battles over what constitutes the past of the nation.
While this is in many ways a course about developments and dynamics that took place in and around "India" as a site of historical production and political projection in various conjunctures in "the past," it is also very much about the conditions and mutually-constitutive discourses on race, caste, gender, class, labor, nation and citizenship in which people experience, frame, critique, defend and otherwise engage myriad imaginings of “India,” in the "present" we currently inhabit. The course is designed accordingly, so that students can develop their reading, analytical, critical and expository skills as we proceed through events and debates around slavery, modernity, and historical practice.