Benjamin Claude Brower

This class addresses the history of anti-colonial struggles in North Africa and the victory over European colonial powers.  These struggles gained momentum after World War II, leading to the independence of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya in the 1950s and 60s.  Coursework will seek to explain the various processes by which independence was achieved, looking at local circumstances as well as the larger regional (Africa, Middle East, and Europe) and global (Cold War, Third World, oil resources) contexts.  The course will also present the complex nature of the armed struggle: wars against the colonial powers unleashed a fury of conflicts, or wars within wars, some of which were not immediately tied to the colonial/anti-colonial struggle. Our study will conclude by highlighting the many successes of these revolutions as well as pointing to their problematic legacies, which serve as the backdrop to today’s revolutions and civil wars in the region.  Students will examine all these questions through sources that will include films, photographs, political propaganda texts, and memoires.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:
Students will learn the skills of critical analysis and interpretation, along with the empirical material associated with the time period itself, including primary sources. Skills will focus on the ability to grasp the complexity of historical debates and rethink received understandings and concepts in light of new evidence.  Coursework and evaluations will focus on students’ ability to marshal evidence to articulate coherent and sustained arguments in writing and verbally.  There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally associated with a course of this level.

REQUIRED TEXTS:  
Hamou Amirouche, Memoirs of a Mujahid, Algeria’s Struggle for Freedom, 1945-1962
Martin Evans, Algeria, France’s Undeclared War
Franz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized        


ASSIGNMENTS:
•    Exams: There will be two exams.  Both will consist of analytical ID’s and essays.  A list of potential ID’s and questions will be available beforehand to help prepare for the exams. You will be expected to respond with material from the readings and lectures.
•    Writing Assignment: You will prepare a short essay based on a series of primary sources.

Grades:
Midterm        25%        
Final Exam        25%
Essay            25%
Participation         25%

Modern French imperialism advanced its claims to power through a division of the world into two parts. In the Mediterranean world this thinking erected a frontier running across the middle of the sea. In the north there was Europe or the “West,” and in the south there was “Islam” or the “East.” The former was home to civilization and progress and the later was a backward place in need of regeneration. For their part, Muslims who fell under French domination or influence deployed their own divisions.  They reproduced parts of French concepts in a complex dialogue with their own history. The goals was to set Muslims towards a future that was modern, but authentic. Therefore throughout the Mediterranean, French imperialism triggered a “civilizing mission” to renew or revitalize society, by force if necessary. Many parts of this thinking have survived the colonial era and mark attitudes in contemporary France and the Middle East. Religion is generally offered as the decisive category determining these divisions, a so-called “clash of civilizations,” with Muslim societies set off as somehow incompatible with secular Europe.  Our task in this course will be to critically consider how these cultural and political frontiers developed, and their use in contests for power. The focus will be on modern France and the Middle Eastern countries that fell under French rule, particularly Algeria, but the course will examine these questions within a broader trans-national context across several historical periods into the present.

This course will use violence as an analytic category to study the last 500 years of history.  Historians typically explain the rise of the state, capitalism, modernity, or even the “rise of the West” in this period. Instead, this course deploys this block of time to understand violence, examining how its practices and norms have changed over time.  Violence can be difficult to describe and locate, and this course will not propose a closed definition of violence. Instead it uses an interrogative and open-ended approach, one that begins with a tentative understanding of violence as a practice inherent to certain social formations.  In this way we approach racism, anti-Semitism, class and gender violence.  It will also pay attention to the modern state and its monopolization of violence through the police and law, which reduced violence such as crime.  At the same, the modern state unleashed historically unprecedented killing in the world wars and genocides of the twentieth century. The course will also seek to understand violence outside of its physical forms, such as that existing in language and gender norms, as well as the “slow violence” of poverty and environmental degradation.  Ultimately, the course seeks to better locate the relationship between violence and power as it reveals itself in history.  Thus, political violence, the violence of war, civil wars, revolutions, and revolts will be of particular concern. 

REQUIRED TEXTS:

• Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 59 (May 1973), 51-59.
• Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010). (selections)
• Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 [1939]). (selections)
• Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, 1985). (selections)
• Ed Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014). (selections)
• Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino famines and the Making of the Third World (London and New York: Verso, 2001). (selections)
• Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945 (London: Verso, 2016). (selections)
• Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” from The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 135-59.
• Joanna Bourke, Rape: Sex, Violence, History (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2007). (selections)

Grades:

Midterm                     30%               

Final Exam                30%

Writing                       30%

Participation             10%

Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course.  The grade scale is as follows:

100-94% = A; 93-90% = A- ; 89-87% = B+ ; 86-84% = B ; 83-80% = B- ; 79-77% = C+ ; 76-74% = C ; 73-70% = C- ; 69-67% = D+ ; 66-64% = D ; 63-60% = D- ; below 60% = F.

This course will use violence as an analytic category to study the last 500 years of history.  Historians typically explain the rise of the state, capitalism, modernity, or even the “rise of the West” in this period. Instead, this course deploys this block of time to understand violence, examining how its practices and norms have changed over time.  Violence can be difficult to describe and locate, and this course will not propose a closed definition of violence. Instead it uses an interrogative and open-ended approach, one that begins with a tentative understanding of violence as a practice inherent to certain social formations.  In this way we approach racism, anti-Semitism, class and gender violence.  It will also pay attention to the modern state and its monopolization of violence through the police and law, which reduced violence such as crime.  At the same, the modern state unleashed historically unprecedented killing in the world wars and genocides of the twentieth century. The course will also seek to understand violence outside of its physical forms, such as that existing in language and gender norms, as well as the “slow violence” of poverty and environmental degradation.  Ultimately, the course seeks to better locate the relationship between violence and power as it reveals itself in history.  Thus, political violence, the violence of war, civil wars, revolutions, and revolts will be of particular concern.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Selected readings in this course will be distributed electronically

GRADES:

Midterm                     30%              

Final Exam                 30%

Writing                       30%

Participation              10%

This class addresses the history of anti-colonial struggles in North Africa and the victory over European colonial powers.  These struggles gained momentum after World War II, leading to the independence of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya in the 1950s and 60s.  Coursework will seek to explain the various processes by which independence was achieved, looking at local circumstances as well as the larger regional (Africa, Middle East, and Europe) and global (Cold War, Third World, oil resources) contexts.  The course will also present the complex nature of the armed struggle: wars against the colonial powers unleashed a fury of conflicts, or wars within wars, some of which were not immediately tied to the colonial/anti-colonial struggle. Our study will conclude by highlighting the many successes of these revolutions as well as pointing to their problematic legacies, which serve as the backdrop to today’s revolutions and civil wars in the region.  Students will examine all these questions through sources that will include films, photographs, political propaganda texts, and memoires.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

Students will learn the skills of critical analysis and interpretation, along with the empirical material associated with the time period itself, including primary sources. Skills will focus on the ability to grasp the complexity of historical debates and rethink received understandings and concepts in light of new evidence.  Coursework and evaluations will focus on students’ ability to marshal evidence to articulate coherent and sustained arguments in writing and verbally.  There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally associated with a course of this level.

REQUIRED TEXTS: 

Hamou Amirouche, Memoirs of a Mujahid, Algeria’s Struggle for Freedom, 1945-1962

Martin Evans, Algeria, France’s Undeclared War

Franz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized       

ASSIGNMENTS:

• Exams: There will be two exams. Both will consist of analytical ID’s and essays.  A list of potential ID’s and questions will be available beforehand to help prepare for the exams. You will be expected to respond with material from the readings and lectures.
• Writing Assignment: You will prepare a short essay based on a series of primary sources.

Grades:

Midterm                     25%               

Final Exam                25%

Essay                         25%

Participation              25%

Summary: This Globalized Classrooms course will ask students to consider the impact of visual culture (photographs, documentary film, and video) on practices of political violence in the last 200 years. Students will pursue a research project focused on a specific event or theme.  Students’ archival research will concentrate itself on the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) on the Université de Paris Nanterre campus and the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) located at the University of Texas, Austin.  This archival research will be framed theoretically and methodologically with prior readings and preparation.  Students will work in mixed teams of UT and Nanterre students who will coordinate their efforts via electronic media and research blogs.  Teams will produce a final multimedia project and papers presenting their team’s findings and conclusions.

Topic/Problematique: The mass proliferation of images has changed political violence in the modern era in important ways. Governments can no longer hide violent practices but must reckon with the impact of factual images on public opinion.  At the same time, films and photography can manipulate viewers or indulge reactionary voyeurism and sadism, such as the phenomena known as “militainment” wherein wars are seen as entertainment.  There is also the problem of what is called today “fake news” deliberately manipulated evidence, that can draw an epistemological fog across troubling events.  The dynamic of this problem connecting violence, images, and politics can be traced within the genre of wartime photography and films.  For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, pioneer British photographer Roger Fenton stunned viewers with his stark images of the Crimean War (held at the HRC). Instead of the action and heroism previously portrayed in paintings, his photographs showed the chaos and confusion of the battlefield with all the realism of the new medium.  When Matthew Brady included corpses in his US Civil War photographs the impact was sealed.  War was no longer a simple theatre of glory but had to be approached in its “terrible reality and earnestness” as the New York Times wrote in 1862.  Early war photography struggled nonetheless to emancipate itself from traditional views. Its incapacity to reflect the heroic battles of the illustrated papers' engravings disappointed operators and audiences alike in the first decades of the new media. By the 1900s, technological changes modified the perspective and a new face of battle emerged from the “kodakisation” of photographic practices.
The realism of photographs and films certainly did not put a stop to war, but it intensified and transformed struggles on the battlefield of public opinion.  This can be seen at the end of the twentieth century. Thus, the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos transformed global public opinion against U.S. practices in occupied Iraq.  Outside of war zones, the films and photos documenting migrant suffering have also mobilized public opinion in important ways (see these BDIC films).  The photographs and films of social movements have also moved politics, such as the struggles around civil rights, decolonization (see Eli Kagan archive BDIC), student and workers’ movements (see Raymon Depardon’s photos of 1968 Massacre in Mexico City held by the HRC). In all these cases, visual media cast unflattering light on violence.  In many cases visual images can humanize victims of political violence, like Vladimir Ablamski’s rare photos of life inside the Soviet Gulag (held at the BDIC).
Of course, photographs and films can work to reinforce, legitimate, and extend violence. Examples of this include “embedded” images and their highly partial vision of violence; macabre photos and films intended as terrifying warnings to enemies (like the 1871 photograph of bodies of Parisian worker killed in the suppression of the Commune, held by the HRC); hostage photos and political snuff films, or more recently homemade battlefield videos made by combatants who give a grassroots image of themselves, often in a highly unflattering light. Thus the political work of visual culture and violence emerges in varied and unpredictable ways.  It will be the task of students in this course to historicize this question by working on specific events in team projects researching original archival sources.

Course work and organization: In this course, UT students will collaborate with students in the Department of Anglophone Studies, Université Paris Nanterre.  The main focus will be on student research in primary historical sources, focusing on the rich collections held by the Harry Ransom Center the Harry Ransom Center and La Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine.  These two archives rank among the richest collections in the world for photographic and film sources, giving students an unrivaled research experience.

Students will combine their research projects with readings that will provide the necessary perspectives to effectively contextualize their sources and pose historiographically meaningful questions to them.  Course work and research will connect across the Atlantic with simultaneous teaching technologies along with asynchronous course work and discussions via a shared Canvas site.   The combined UT-Paris Nanterre student teams will cultivate cross cultural perspectives to questions of common concern. English will be the language of instruction and research.


REQUIRED TEXTS:
You will need to purchase the following books (order placed at University Coop), or use reserve copies in the Perry-Castañeda Library.  Some titles are also available electronically through the library catalogue.
•    Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (selections).
•    Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (selections).
•    Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (selections).
•    Zahid R. Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India (selections)
•    Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All – Four Photographs from Auschwitz (selections)
•    Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence  (selections)
•    James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (selections)
•    Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Additional required readings, as noted in schedule of class meetings, will be available electronically via Canvas.  

Other: Required material in the course also includes several films.  Students will watch these on their own prior to the scheduled discussion.  Please see the schedule of class meetings.

This course presents the major themes of North African history from the sixteenth century to today. North African history intersects several fields of study (European, African, and Middle Eastern studies) and Muslims, Christians, and Jews have made their homes here, marking the region with multi-religious and multi-linguistic traditions. Looking in particular at that part of North Africa known in Arabic as the Maghrib (today’s Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania), the course begins in the early modern Mediterranean period.  At this time, merchants and privateers linked Europe and the Middle East from the Maghreb's ports, and in the interior, caravans of scholars and slaves linked the region to sub-Saharan Africa. Our attention then moves into to the period of European ascendency, when France in particular established itself as the preeminent power in North Africa, beginning with the invasion of Algeria in 1830 and culminating in the 1912 French protectorate in Morocco.  The period of European colonial rule came to an end in the decades after the Second World War, and the course concludes with the challenges faced by post-colonial states during the Cold War and the rise of Islamist political opposition movements in the 1990s.

This seminar undertakes a post-colonial reading of continental, western European society in the second half of the twentieth century, bringing it into relation with the history of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Political exclusion, social inequalities, and cultural divides mark this history. It is a contentious and sometimes violent era.  This turn of events might have caught some of the people who anticipated Europe’s decolonization off guard.  For them, the end of empire was to have been a new chapter in the history of emancipation, even if it was only the emancipation of Europeans freed from the problems and expense of overseas territories.  But decolonization proved to be difficult in the metropole, as it was in the countries occupied by Europeans.  If decolonization was about realizing a specific vision of sovereignty and the nation, then post-colonial European societies faced new or unresolved questions about citizenship and democracy, race and religion, sexuality and identity.  These did not disentangle themselves easily from colonial struggles but often represented the repetition or displacement of earlier dramas.  This seminar will engage a newly emerging body of scholarship on these questions, with the goal of helping students make connections to their own research projects and thinking.

·      Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us: Towards a Politics of Revolutionary Love (MIT, 2017)
·      Katerine Ewing, Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford UP, 2008)
·      Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Univ of CA Press, 2017)
·      Nilüfer Göle, The Daily Lives of Muslims: Islam and Public Confrontation in Contemporary Europe (Zed Books, 2015)
·      Ethan Katz, The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France (Harvard UP, 2015)
·      Cécile Laborde, Critical Republicanism (Oxford UP 2008)
·      Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke UP, 2017)
·      Joan Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton UP, 2018)
·      Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity (Pluto, 2016)

Modern French imperialism advanced its claims to power through a division of the world into two parts. In the Mediterranean world this thinking erected a frontier running across the middle of the sea. In the north there was Europe or the “West,” and in the south there was “Islam” or the “East.” The former was home to civilization and progress and the later was a backward place in need of regeneration. For their part, Muslims who fell under French domination or influence deployed their own divisions.  They reproduced parts of French concepts in a complex dialogue with their own history. The goal was to set Muslims towards a future that was modern, but authentic. Therefore, throughout the Mediterranean, French imperialism triggered a “civilizing mission” to renew or revitalize society, by force if necessary. Many parts of this thinking have survived the colonial era and mark attitudes in contemporary France and the Middle East. Religion is generally offered as the decisive category determining these divisions, a so-called “clash of civilizations,” with Muslim societies set off as somehow incompatible with secular Europe.  Our task in this course will be to critically consider how these cultural and political frontiers developed, and their use in contests for power. The focus will be on modern France and the Middle Eastern countries that fell under French rule, particularly Algeria, but the course will examine these questions within a broader trans-national context across several historical periods into the present.

HIS 394H - 39815 - INTRO TO HISTORICAL INQUIRY Brower, Benjamin & Lichtenstein, Tatjana

This course is designed to introduce all incoming history graduate students to a variety of theoretical, methodological, or historiographical approaches to the past.

Readings will represent a range of approaches: micro- and macro-, local and transnational, cultural, political, intellectual, and economic.

Grading:

Grades will be based on class participation and several short to medium writing assignments.

In this course students will gain an understanding of European history over the last five centuries. We will investigate a range of significant developments in the social, cultural, and economic history of the European continent and beyond.  Lectures and readings will proceed chronologically from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century.  This time frame is marked by Europe’s growing global hegemony, manifest in forces such as colonialism and industrial capitalism, making its history of world historical importance.  The institutions of the modern state appeared at the beginning of our period, and they were accompanied by an uneven process of social and political transformation marked by the “dual revolutions,” the French and Industrial Revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. The course will look at these processes along with the emergence of a class-based society in the nineteenth century.  We will also investigate intellectual and cultural forces such as modern ideologies of rupture and the trend toward secular thought.  We conclude with the contemporary period, an age marked in Europe by material abundance but plagued by unequal social relations and enduring social discontent.

Texts:

Joshua Cole and Carol Symes, Western Civilizations: Their History & Their Culture, Vol. 2, 18th ed.

Grades:

Midterm                      30%                

Final Exam                  30%

Writing                        30%

Participation               10%

This class addresses the history of anti-colonial struggles in North Africa and the victory over European colonial powers.  These struggles gained momentum after World War II, leading to the independence of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya in the 1950s and 60s.  Coursework will seek to explain the various processes by which independence was achieved, looking at local circumstances as well as the larger regional (Africa, Middle East, and Europe) and global (Cold War, Third World, oil resources) contexts.  The course will also present the complex nature of the armed struggle: wars against the colonial powers unleashed a fury of conflicts, or wars within wars, some of which were not immediately tied to the colonial/anti-colonial struggle. Our study will conclude by highlighting the many successes of these revolutions as well as pointing to their problematic legacies, which serve as the backdrop to today’s revolutions and civil wars in the region.  Students will examine all these questions through sources that will include films, photographs, political propaganda texts, and memoires.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

Students will learn the skills of critical analysis and interpretation, along with the empirical material associated with the time period itself, including primary sources. Skills will focus on the ability to grasp the complexity of historical debates and rethink received understandings and concepts in light of new evidence.  Coursework and evaluations will focus on students’ ability to marshal evidence to articulate coherent and sustained arguments in writing and verbally.  There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally associated with a course of this level.

Texts:

REQUIRED TEXTS: 

Hamou Amirouche, Memoirs of a Mujahid, Algeria’s Struggle for Freedom, 1945-1962

Martin Evans, Algeria, France’s Undeclared War

Franz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism

Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized       

Grading:

ASSIGNMENTS:

•           Exams: There will be two exams.  Both will consist of analytical ID’s and essays.  A list of potential ID’s and questions will be available beforehand to help prepare for the exams. You will be expected to respond with material from the readings and lectures.

•           Writing Assignment: You will prepare a short essay based on a series of primary sources.

Grades:

Midterm                     25%               

Final Exam                25%

Essay                         25%

Participation                         25%

Violence has been a constant feature of history yet it is a topic that historians have had trouble understanding and explaining.  Endemic and problematic, violence is also ever changing and many hued, making its study especially difficult. This seminar will focus on the skills necessary for the historian working on violent phenomena.  We shall examine how historians themselves have approached episodes of violence, but we will also look outside of the discipline of history to see how psychoanalysts, anthropologists, novelists, and activists have both understood violence and how they represent it in their work. This is a research and writing course.  This means that students will be required to develop experience working in historical sources and, in particular, demonstrate mastery of advanced writing skills.

Texts:

•           Alain Corbin, Village of Cannibals (Harvard University Press: 2006). ISBN 0674939018.

•           Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New Press, 2003).  ISBN 1565848160.

•           Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage, 2004). ISBN 1400033411.

•           Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New Press, 2003). ISBN 1565847881.

•           Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad (NYRB Classics, 2005). ISBN 1590171454.

•           Georges Vigarello, A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the 16th to the 20th Century (Polity Press, 2001), ISBN: 0745621708

Grading:

Short Papers:           30% (15% each)                 

Final Essay               50%

Presentation             10%

Participation             10%

This course presents the major themes of North African history from the sixteenth century to today. North African history intersects several fields of study (European, African, and Middle Eastern studies) and Muslims, Christians, and Jews have made their homes here, marking the region with multi-religious and multi-linguistic traditions. Looking in particular at that part of North Africa known in Arabic as the Maghrib (today’s Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania), the course begins in the early modern Mediterranean period.  At this time, merchants and privateers linked Europe and the Middle East from the Maghreb's ports, and in the interior, caravans of scholars and slaves linked the region to sub-Saharan Africa. Our attention then moves into to the period of European ascendency, when France in particular established itself as the preeminent power in North Africa, beginning with the invasion of Algeria in 1830 and culminating in the 1912 French protectorate in Morocco.  The period of European colonial rule came to an end in the decades after the Second World War, and the course concludes with the challenges faced by post-colonial states during the Cold War and the rise of Islamist political opposition movements in the 1990s.

Texts:

1.     Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007) ISBN: 0801886236

2.     Assia Djebar, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade (Heinemann, 1993) ISBN: 1583225161

3.     Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Beacon Press, 1991) ISBN: 0435086219

4.     Malika Mokkadem, Of Dreams and Assassins (University of Virginia Press, 2000)

5.     Phillip C. Naylor, North Africa: A History from Antiquity to the Present (University of Texas Press, 2010) ISBN: 0292722915

6.     Muhammad as-Saffar, Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France in 1845-1846 (University of California Press, 1992) ISBN: 0520074629

Grading:

·  Exams: There will be one midterm and a comprehensive final exam.  These exams will consist of analytical ID’s and essays.  A list of potential ID’s and questions will be distributed to prepare for the exams.  SEE CLASS SCHEDULE FOR DATES.

·  Short response papers: you will write three brief papers on the in class readings. You can choose to write on any three of the four primary-source books (i.e. Djebar, Memmi, Mokkadem, as-Saffar). You will summarize and analyze how each reflects and challenges the themes of North African history. Length: 2-3 pp., double-spaced, 12 pnt. font. Proofread carefully: correct use of language is expected and will figure in grading. Due dates: in the class meeting scheduled for discussion of each book.

GRADES:

Midterm                      25%               

Final Exam                  35%

Writing                        25%

Participation               15%

Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course.  The grade scale is as follows:

100-93% = A; 92-90% = A- ; 89-87% = B+ ; 86-83% = B ; 82-80% = B- ; 79-77% = C+ ; 76-73% = C ; 72-70% = C- ; 69-67% = D+ ; 66-63% = D ; 62-60% = D- ; below 60% = F.

In this course, we examine the central cultural characteristics of the Western heritage after the Reformation and discuss their transformation up to the present. A chronological narrative of the history in question will be provided by the lecturer and the textbook, but the most significant portion of our time together will be devoted to the examination of a number of central questions within western society since the Reformation. We will attempt to formulate an understanding of “western civilization” and its central concerns and transformations, with a particular attention paid to economy and politics in their relationships to culture and freedom. We will discuss such issues as the construction of political authority and its relationship to emerging conceptions of political liberty, revolution, popular sovereignty, and political economy. We will examine and explain the emergence of the central characteristics of modern Western society, including mass society, democracy, colonialism, secularism, political sovereignty, and the nation-state. Focus in the course is away from memorization of factual information about European history and toward reading, discussion, interpretation and criticism of texts that exemplify certain moments in the western tradition. By reading, discussing, analyzing and criticizing these sources, students will receive an introduction to the tasks involved in “thinking like a historian.”

Prerequisites:  Students taking this course are assumed to be capable of an informed, critical stance toward the claims of the lecturer. No previous knowledge of the subject matter is assumed.

Possible Texts:

Mark Kishlansky et al., Civilization in the West, vol. 2

Jean Calvin, Golden Book of the True Christian Life

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (selections)

Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise

Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel

J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire / Economic Consequences of the Peace (selections)

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (selections)

Additional readings will be distributed in class or are available on the Internet

Assignments & Grading:

Compliance with syllabus policy 0%

Compliance with attendance policy 0%

Paper 1 @ 15%

Paper 2 @ 25%

Final paper @ 30%

Average of regular quizzes @ 30% each (I will drop your two lowest scores)

This course presents a survey of the Hajj, Islam’s major pilgrimage to Mecca and the nearby Holy Places.  It will examine the Islamic pilgrimage from its beginnings in the seventh century C.E. through today.  In addition to the historian’s perennial attention to the theme of continuity and change, this course will focus on the political and social dimensions of Hajj. This includes understanding the unity and difference of Muslims as evidenced in the pilgrimage, and how it has functioned as a motor of social movement around the world.  Most importantly, we will study how states have used the Hajj to found their sovereignty and establish the legitimacy of their leaders.  This intersection of politics and pilgrimage was important to the first four Caliphs and the great Islamic empires of the early centuries of Islam, and it continued to be even for the European colonial powers when they counted Muslims among their subjects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  And just as the Hajj served to support power, it could be used to contest it, as the long history of rebellions and oppositional movements working through the pilgrimage shows.

Texts:

Asad, The Road to Mecca

Bianchi, Guests of God

McMillan, The Meaning of Mecca

Shariati, Hajj: Reflections on Its Rituals

Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey

Wolf ed., One Thousand Roads to Mecca 

Grading:

Midterm                     25%               

Final Exam                35%

Writing                      25%

Participation              15%

Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course.

This reading seminar will rethink the problem of understanding violence in the colonial situation.  Much recent historiography charts new ways to think about how colonial power is produced and contested through things like architecture, sexuality, statistics, boundaries, definitions, manners, law, and citizenship, along with all the various configurations that make up a colonial episteme. It is here, the argument goes, that colonial power--subtle, sophisticated, and generally insidious--is produced and not out of the end of the gun. The question of violence in its physical dimensions, such as the body in pain, generally recedes from view in these studies. Thus although colonial historians today still write under the shadow of Franz Fanon, they have very little to say about the relationship of violence to political power. As a result, the violence of colonialism is displaced as somehow not as worthy a subject as these “other spaces of domination.” Our work in this course will seek ways that colonial historians might reconnect with the question of violence.

Texts:

1.         Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973) ISBN-13: 0-15-670153-7

2.         Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 2005) ISBN-13: 978-0802141323

3.         Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976 (Picador, 2003) ISBN-13: 978-0312422660

4.         David Galula, Pacification in Algeria, 1956-1958. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corp., 2006. ISBN-13: 978-0833039200

5.         Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Cornell UP, 2006) ISBN-13: 978-0801472930

6.         Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (Penguin, 2008)

7.         Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford UP, 2009) ISBN-13: 978-0199734801

8.         Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (Telos Press, 2006) ISBN-13: 978-0914386308.

Grading:

Final Paper                             40%

Short response papers            35%

Participation                           25% 

Violence has been a constant feature of history yet it is a topic that historians have had trouble understanding and explaining.  Endemic and problematic, violence is also ever changing and many hued, making its study especially difficult. This seminar will focus on the skills necessary for the historian working on violent phenomena.  We shall examine how historians themselves have approached episodes of violence, but we will also look outside of the discipline of history to see how psychoanalysts, anthropologists, novelists, and activists have both understood violence and how they represent it in their work. This is a research and writing course.  This means that students will be required to develop experience working in historical sources and, in particular, demonstrate mastery of advanced writing skills.

Texts:

•          Alain Corbin, Village of Cannibals (Harvard University Press: 2006). ISBN 0674939018.

•          Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New Press, 2003).  ISBN 1565848160.

•          Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage, 2004). ISBN 1400033411.

•          Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New Press, 2003). ISBN 1565847881.

•          Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad (NYRB Classics, 2005). ISBN 1590171454.

•          Georges Vigarello, A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the 16th to the 20th Century (Polity Press, 2001), ISBN: 0745621708

Grading:

Short Papers:          30% (15% each)                

Final Essay                50%

Presentation             10%

Participation             10%

Modern French imperialism advanced its claims to global power through a division of the world into a two parts. On one hand was a space of civilization and modernity and, on the other, there was a primitive space inhabited by people who needed to be liberated or dominated. In the Mediterranean world this thinking erected a frontier running across the middle of the sea. In the north there was the “West” or “Europe,” and in the south there was the “East” or “Islam.” The West, represented by France, was construed as the conveyor of modern values and progress, while the East was a place of archaism and reaction that needed to be renewed, by force if necessary. French thinkers called this the “civilizing mission,” and it justified France’s colonization of Muslim countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many parts of this thinking have survived the colonial era and mark attitudes in contemporary, post-colonial France. Religion is generally offered as the decisive category determining these divisions, with the Muslim societies of Africa and the Middle East set off as somehow essentially different and incompatible with France and its Christian or secular traditions.

Paying special attention to the religious and secular dimensions of the problem, our work in this course will critically consider how these cultural and political frontiers developed, and their use in contests for power. The focus will be on modern France and the Middle Eastern countries that fell under French rule in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly Algeria, but the course will examine these questions within a broader trans-national context across several historical periods.

COURSE OBJECTIVES: Students will learn the skills of historical analysis and interpretation, along with the empirical material associated with the course itself. This will include the ability to grasp the complexity of historical debates and rethink received understandings and concepts in light of new evidence. Coursework and evaluations will focus on students’ ability to articulate coherent and sustained arguments in writing and verbally. There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally associated with a course of this level.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

You will need to purchase the following books or use reserve copies in library.

• Kateb Yacine, Nedjma (University of Virginia Press, 2001). ISBN-13: 978-0813913131
• Anonymous, The Song of Roland (Penguin, 1990) ISBN-13: 978-0140445329
• Abdellah Hammoudi, A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage (Hill and Wang, 2006) ISBN-13:978-0809076093
• Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979) ISBN: 039474067X
• Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton UP, 2007) ISBN: 0691125430
• Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot, Venice and the Sublime Port (Cornell UP, 2009) ISBN:0801475430

Additional required readings, as noted in schedule of class meetings, will be distributed electronically or placed on library reserve.

Other: Required material in the course also includes music, photographs, films and various visual texts such as music videos that will be played/projected in class.

GRADES:Midterm            25%

Final Exam            35%

Writing            25%

Participation            15%

The goal of this seminar is to rethink the place of trauma within history and historiography as part of the Institute for Historical Study’s theme, “Trauma and Social Transformation.” My fundamental premise is that psychoanalysis and historiography share a productive relationship, despite having different, even incommensurable epistemological points of departure.  In particular, psychoanalysis offers a unique perspective to interrogate questions of key importance to historians such as authority, difference, temporality, method and sources, all questions that open towards analytically rich, self-interrogative historiographical practices.  Trauma is field of study were this relationship can unfold.  By trauma I mean a fundamental crisis in the symbolic field, such as the reduction to silence in the wake of a violence that seems beyond representation or understanding.  Such epistemological crises can be transformative historical experiences for individuals and societies, and they can lead to a variety of social and political outcomes, such as apathy, messianism, war, social displacement, and political mobilization.  Trauma can also be instrumentalized in strategies of political hegemony, or it can transmute into moral categories such as the victim. For historians, writing trauma requires an awareness of the complex responses traumatic subjects can provoke and maintaining a balance between protective numbing and full identification with victims. It also requires attention to language and readiness to engage absences, ambivalence, and ambiguity in our sources rather than strive for the goals of full intelligibility or narrative closure.  The seminar will begin with a selection of texts engaging theoretical issues and the Holocaust, and it will finish with readings on trauma and memory in non-European contexts.

 Readings (tentative):

You will need to purchase the following books or use the library’s copies on reserve. Other assigned readings will be distributed electronically.

1.     Saul Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution

2.     Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and others.

3.     Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

4.     Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)

5.     Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994)

6.     Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

8.     Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford UP)

9.     Heonik Kwon, After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai

10.  Toni Morison, Beloved

11.  Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War

12.  Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (Columbia Univeristy Press, 2007. Yoav Di-Capua, “The Traumatic Subjectivity of Su? n? Alla?h Ibra?hi?m’s Dha?t”

13.  Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992 (University of California Press, 1995)

14.  Virginia Garrand-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efrain Rios Montt, 1982-1983 (Oxford UP, 2010)

15.  Federico Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina (Oxford UP, 2014)

 Grading:

·      History of a Class Session:  20%

·      Class Participation and Presentation:  30%

·      Final Essay:  50% 

Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course.  The grade scale is as follows:

100-93% = A; 92-90% = A- ; 89-87% = B+ ; 86-83% = B ; 82-80% = B- ; 79-77% = C+ ; 76-73% = C ; 72-70% = C- ; 69-67% = D+ ; 66-63% = D ; 62-60% = D- ; below 60% = F.

Course Overview: In this course, we examine the central cultural characteristics of the Western heritage after the Reformation and discuss their transformation up to the present. A chronological narrative of the history in question will be provided by the lecturer and the textbook, but the most significant portion of our time together will be devoted to the examination of a number of central questions within western society since the Reformation. We will attempt to formulate an understanding of “western civilization” and its central concerns and transformations, with a particular attention paid to economy and politics in their relationships to culture and freedom. We will discuss such issues as the construction of political authority and its relationship to emerging conceptions of political liberty, revolution, popular sovereignty, and political economy. We will examine and explain the emergence of the central characteristics of modern Western society, including mass society, democracy, colonialism, secularism, political sovereignty, and the nation-state. Focus in the course is away from memorization of factual information about European history and toward reading, discussion, interpretation and criticism of texts that exemplify certain moments in the western tradition. By reading, discussing, analyzing and criticizing these sources, students will receive an introduction to the tasks involved in “thinking like a historian.”

Prerequisites:  Students taking this course are assumed to be capable of an informed, critical stance toward the claims of the lecturer. No previous knowledge of the subject matter is assumed.

Possible Texts:

Mark Kishlansky et al., Civilization in the West, vol. 2

Jean Calvin, Golden Book of the True Christian Life

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (selections)

Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise

Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel

J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire / Economic Consequences of the Peace (selections)

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (selections)

Additional readings will be distributed in class or are available on the Internet

Assignments & Grading:

Compliance with syllabus policy 0%

Compliance with attendance policy 0%

Paper 1 @ 15%

Paper 2 @ 25%

Final paper @ 30%

Average of regular quizzes @ 30% each (I will drop your two lowest scores)

COURSE DESCRIPTION:This course presents the major themes of North African history from the sixteenth century to today. North African history intersects several fields of study (European, African, and Middle Eastern studies) and Muslims, Christians, and Jews have made their homes here, marking the region with multi-religious and multi-linguistic traditions. Looking in particular at that part of North Africa known in Arabic as the Maghrib (today’s Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya), the course begins in the early modern Mediterranean period.  At this time, merchants and privateers linked Europe and the Middle East from the Maghreb’s ports, and in the interior, caravans of scholars and slaves linked the region to sub-Saharan Africa. Our attention then moves into to the period of European ascendency, when France in particular established itself as the preeminent power in North Africa, beginning with the invasion of Algeria in 1830 and culminating in the 1912 French protectorate in Morocco.  The period of European colonial rule came to an end in the decades after the Second World War, and the course concludes with the challenges faced by post-colonial states during the Cold War and the rise of Islamist political opposition movements in the 1990s.

The fundamental task of this seminar is to examine the boundaries and frontiers that shape how scholars of the Middle East and Europe conduct their work. The area studies paradigm, common to Anglo-American scholarship, relies upon lines drawn across space, lines that come to us as fixed and unalterable, and they purport to reflect geographic, socio-economic, cultural, and political realities. They are thus taken for granted by most scholars. But boundaries and frontiers demand careful historicization, as well as sustained epistemological critique. Seemingly universal, inevitable, and necessary, they are in fact often contingent are always the result of history and politics. This seminar will engage texts that open a space in which these divisions can be rethought. In particular it will seek works that examine those historical movements that have transgressed or overflowed the boundaries by which an area of the world roughly centered on the Mediterranean Sea has been partitioned.

Course Overview: In this course, we examine the central cultural characteristics of the Western heritage after the Reformation and discuss their transformation up to the present. A chronological narrative of the history in question will be provided by the lecturer and the textbook, but the most significant portion of our time together will be devoted to the examination of a number of central questions within western society since the Reformation. We will attempt to formulate an understanding of “western civilization” and its central concerns and transformations, with a particular attention paid to economy and politics in their relationships to culture and freedom. We will discuss such issues as the construction of political authority and its relationship to emerging conceptions of political liberty, revolution, popular sovereignty, and political economy. We will examine and explain the emergence of the central characteristics of modern Western society, including mass society, democracy, colonialism, secularism, political sovereignty, and the nation-state. Focus in the course is away from memorization of factual information about European history and toward reading, discussion, interpretation and criticism of texts that exemplify certain moments in the western tradition. By reading, discussing, analyzing and criticizing these sources, students will receive an introduction to the tasks involved in “thinking like a historian.”

Prerequisites:  Students taking this course are assumed to be capable of an informed, critical stance toward the claims of the lecturer. No previous knowledge of the subject matter is assumed.

Possible Texts:

Mark Kishlansky et al., Civilization in the West, vol. 2

Jean Calvin, Golden Book of the True Christian Life

John Locke, Second Treatise of Government

Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (selections)

Émile Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise

Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel

J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire / Economic Consequences of the Peace (selections)

Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (selections)

Additional readings will be distributed in class or are available on the Internet

Assignments & Grading:

Compliance with syllabus policy 0%

Compliance with attendance policy 0%

Paper 1 @ 15%

Paper 2 @ 25%

Final paper @ 30%

Average of regular quizzes @ 30% each (I will drop your two lowest scores)

The great historian of the Mediterranean Sea, Fernand Braudel, wrote that people here “live and breathe with the same rhythms,” meaning that Mediterranean societies have a shared destiny. Today, however, it is common to divide this region into northern and southern halves, variously called the West and East, or Europe and Islam. Our work in this course will critically consider the development of these categories, and their use in history down to the present. The focus will be on the role of modern France and France’s Mediterranean empire, but we shall examine other cases and contexts as well.

You will need to purchase the following books or use reserve copies in library.

Mouloud Feraoun, The Poor Man's Son: Menrad, Kabyle Schoolteacher (University of Virginia Press, 2005).  ISBN: 0813923263.

‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Napoleon In Egypt: Al-Jabarti's Chronicle Of The French Occupation, 1798. (Markus Wiener Publishers, 1993) ISBN: 1558763376.

Susan G. Miller, Disorienting Encounters: Travels of a Moroccan Scholar in France. (ISBN: 0520074629)

Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979) ISBN: 039474067X

Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton UP, 2007).  ISBN: 0691125430

John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (Columbia UP, 2002). ISBN: 0231123337.

Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot, Venice and the Sublime Port. (Cornell UP, 2009) ISBN: 0801475430.

Required material in the course also includes music, photographs, films and various visual texts such as music videos that will be played/projected in class.

Grades:

Midterm   25%                       

Final Exam  35%

Writing    25%

Participation  15%

Grade Scale: 90 – 100% = A; 80 – 89% =B; 70 – 79% = C; 69 – 60% = D; below 60% = F.

This course presents the major themes of Algerian history from the sixteenth century to today. This story begins in 1516 and the Ottoman period, when formidable fleets of Algerian corsairs struggled with Spanish, French, and even American ships in the “jihad al-bahr” (jihad at sea). The course ends after a grueling but brilliantly won war of national liberation against colonial France (1954-62) became a revolution betrayed, when Algeria entered a period of terrorism in the 1990s. Algeria’s history intersects several fields of study (European, African, and Middle Eastern studies) and it is a country that has been home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, speaking many different languages. The course seeks to give expression to these multi-religious and multi-linguistic traditions. Therefore, students should be ready to cross methodological and cultural borders.

Students will learn the skills of historical analysis and interpretation, along with the material described above. This will include the ability to grasp the complexity of historical debates and rethink received knowledge and concepts in light of new evidence.  Coursework and evaluations will focus on students’ ability to articulate coherent and sustained arguments in writing and verbally.  There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally associated with a course of this level.

Texts

You will need to purchase the following books or use reserve copies in library.

•   Henri Alleg, The Question (Bison Books, 2006), ISBN: 0803259603
•   Assia Djebar, Algerian White (Seven Stories Press, 2003) ISBN: 1583225161.
•   Mouloud Feraoun, The Poor Man's Son: Menrad, Kabyle Schoolteacher (University of Virginia Press, 2005).  ISBN: 0813923263
•   Rachid Mimouni, The Honor of the Tribe: A Novel (William Morrow, 1992) 0688097464
•   John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Indiana University Press, 2005) ISBN: 0253217822
•  Additional required readings noted in schedule of class meetings will be distributed electronically or placed on library reserve. 
•  Other: Required material in the course also includes music, photographs, films and various visual texts such as music videos.

Grading

Midterm                        25%                       

Final Exam                        35%

Writing                        25%

Participation                        15%

This seminar will rethink the problem of understanding violence in the colonial situation. Much

recent historiography charts new ways to think about how colonial power is produced and

contested through things like architecture, sexuality, statistics, boundaries, definitions, manners,

law, and citizenship, along with all the various configurations that make up a colonial episteme.

It is here, the argument goes, that colonial power--subtle, sophisticated, and generally insidious--

is produced and not out of the end of the gun. The question of violence in its physical

dimensions, such as the body in pain, generally recedes from view in these studies. Thus

although colonial historians today still write under the shadow of Franz Fanon, they have very

little to say about the relationship of violence to political power. As a result, the violence of

colonialism is displaced as somehow not as worthy a subject as these “other spaces of

domination.” Our work in this course will seek ways that colonial historians might reconnect

with the question of violence.

Texts

You will need to purchase the following books or use the library’s copies. Other assigned

readings will be distributed electronically.

1. Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992 (Univ. of

California Press, 1995) ISBN-13: 978-0520087804

2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973)

ISBN-13: 978-0156701532

3. Etienne Balibar, Race, Nation, Class (Verso, 1991) ISBN-13: 978-0860915423

4. Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France's Empire in the

Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902 (Columbia UP, 2009) ISBN-13: 978-0231154925

5. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third

World

6. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 2005) ISBN-13: 978-0802141323

7. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-

1976 (Picador, 2003) ISBN-13: 978-0312422660

8. Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial

Germany (Cornell UP, 2006) ISBN-13: 978-0801472930

9. Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's

Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford UP, 2009) ISBN-13: 978-0199734801

10. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum

Europaeum (Telos Press, 2006) ISBN-13: 978-0914386308.

Assignments:

Short response papers: These papers will you help work through the issues of the readings and

yield useful references. You are asked to summarize each week’s reading(s) and develop a brief

critical analysis of the author’s argument, evidence, and methodology. Length: 2 pp., doublespaced,

12 pnt. font. Proofread carefully: correct use of language is expected and will figure in

grading. Due date: These papers are due before each class at 8:00am. You may submit them

electronically in an email attachment.

Final Review Essay: Each student will prepare a final review essay of 10 pages. You will select

a total of 3 books (1-2 one from the course and 1-2 related outside books) on a related theme and

write a review essay. Due date: Last class meeting.

Grading:

Final Paper 40%

Short response papers 35%

Participation 25%

Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course. The grade scale is as follows:

100-93% = A; 92-90% = A- ; 89-87% = B+ ; 86-83% = B ; 82-80% = B- ; 79-77% = C+ ;

76-73% = C ; 72-70% = C- ; 69-67% = D+ ; 66-63% = D ; 62-60% = D- ; below 60% = F.

Writing Violence in History
HIS 350L-39295
Fall 2010

Instructor: Benjamin C. Brower                                                             Telephone: 512-475-6813
Office: Garrison 0.116                                                                         Email: benbrower@mail.utexas.edu
Office Hours: M 10:15-11:45; W 3:00-4:00,                                    Class Meeting Times: MWF 9-10am
                     and by appointment                                                           Meeting Place: PAR 103

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Violence has been a constant feature of history yet it is a topic that historians have had trouble understanding and explaining. Many scholars simply ignore violence, dismissing it as an enigmatic disruption of the otherwise intelligible course of history, or as a minor addendum to other human events. This seminar will take a different departure. Violence will be our starting point to understand history.

Endemic and problematic, violence is also ever changing and many hued, making its study especially difficult. This seminar will focus on the skills necessary for the historian working on violent phenomena. We shall examine how historians themselves have explained violent episodes, but we will also look outside of the discipline of history to see how psychoanalysts, anthropologists, novelists, and activists have both understood violence and how they represent it in their work.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

This is a research and writing course. Its objectives are threefold: (1) learn the methodologies required for the interdisciplinary study of violence, (2) develop experience working in primary historical sources, and (3) master advanced writing skills. There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally required for a course of this level.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

You will need to purchase the following books or use reserve copies in the library.

• Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (Columbia University Press: 2007). ISBN 0231141521.
• Alain Corbin, Village of Cannibals (Harvard University Press: 2006). ISBN 0674939018.
• Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New Press, 2003). ISBN 1565848160.
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage, 2004). ISBN 1400033411.
• Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New Press, 2003). ISBN 1565847881.

Additional required readings, as noted in schedule of class meetings, will be distributed electronically or placed on library reserve.

Other: Required material also includes films and video clips that will be screened in class.

COURSE RULES:

• Laptops are to be used only for taking notes. Students are expected to disable the Internet accessibility function of all electronic devises used in class. Thus there will be no use of email, web browsers, or other software that accesses the Internet during our meetings. If you would like the record the lectures, please see me first.
• Cell phone use of any sort, including text messages, will not be tolerated.

ASSIGNMENTS:

I. Writing: There will be two short writing assignments and a final research paper. There is no final exam. Additional informal writing exercises will be assigned periodically during the semester.

1. Two Short Papers: Each of these will help you prepare the conceptualization and execution of the final paper. In the first writing assignment, you will discuss some of the problems related to writing the history of violence as seen in our first group of readings. In the second assignment you will provide a research proposal and bibliography for your final paper. Each of these papers will go through a process of peer review of a first draft, revisions, and evaluation and grading by the instructor. More details will be given in class. The due dates are listed below. Alternate project for second short assignment: Complete a full application for the Undergraduate Research Fellowship at UT.   See guidelines at http://www.utexas.edu/research/attach/admin/awards/URF0910App.pdf . This project can then be submitted to the Awards Committee for actual consideration in the Spring Semester; the awards go up to $1,000. The deadline Monday, 1 February 2010.

2. Final Paper: This will be a major piece of research and writing. You are expected to undertake a substantial research project focused on a topic and group of historical sources of your choosing (with certain exceptions that will be explained in class). The project will develop in several stages. You will receive instructor review and commentary on a rough draft before turning in the final version 15-20 pages in length. The due dates are listed below.

II. Discussions and Presentations:

1. All students are expected to be well prepared for discussions. This means having completed the assigned readings and coming with questions to pose to the text that we can work through as a group. Students who fail this will be score poorly in participation points. Shyness is not an excuse for not to participating. If it becomes clear that students as a group are not prepared for discussions, they will be required to hand in short written summaries of the readings and turn in written discussion questions at the beginning of our meeting.

2. You will make a short presentation on your final project in class on the dates indicated below. Presenters will briefly describe their topic, goals, and sources, and the audience is expected to respond with helpful, critical questions and commentary. Your grades will be based both on your oral presentation, and on the feedback you offer to your colleagues.

III. Instructor Meetings:

All students are strongly encouraged to meet with me during the course of the semester with any questions and concerns. A required individual conference will take place after turning in the rough draft of the final paper. In this meeting we will discuss revisions for the final paper.

GRADES:
Two Short Papers:   30% (15% each)
Final Essay                  50%
Presentation                  10%
Participation                 10%

Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course. The grade scale is as follows: 100-93% = A; 92-90% = A- ; 89-87% = B+ ; 86-83% = B ; 82-80% = B- ; 79-77% = C+ ; 76-73% = C ; 72-70% = C- ; 69-67% = D+ ; 66-63% = D ; 62-60% = D- ; below 60% = F.

Extensions: Students who need an extension on the writing assignment must consult me prior to the deadline. Extensions will be granted in the case of exceptional circumstances, as well as documented illness, official university events, religious holy days, and for other university- excused reasons.

ATTENDANCE:

• This is a seminar: attendance, preparation, and active participation in all course sessions are mandatory.
• Please familiarize yourself with the University’s policy concerning excused absences. Unexcused absences as well as lack of preparation and tardiness will impinge upon your final grade: 2 unexcused absences will result in the loss of 1 full letter grade; more than 4 will result in loss of 2 full letter grades.
• Religious Holy Days: By UT Austin policy, please notify me of your pending absence fourteen days prior to the anticipated date of observance of religious holy days. If you must miss a class, an examination, or an assignment for religious observance, I will give you an opportunity to complete the missed work within a reasonable time after the absence.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HONOR CODE:
The core values of The University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the university is expected to uphold these values through integrity, honesty, trust, fairness, and respect toward peers and community.

All work for this course will be that of the student and original contributions. Writing done for a previous course cannot be used to fulfill assignments in this course. I militantly pursue cases of suspected plagiarism and cheating.

*** Late assignments are penalized, plagiarism is prosecuted***

Documented Disabilities
The University of Texas at Austin provides upon request appropriate academic accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. For more information, contact Services for Students with Disabilities at 471-6259 (voice) or 232-2937 (video phone.)

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE OF CLASS MEETINGS, Fall 2010

(Subject to Revisions and Changes)

WEEK ONE: August 25 & 27
            Wednesday: Introduction
            Friday: Defining Violence

WEEK TWO: August 30-Sept. 3
Writing Violence: The Problem of Representation
            Monday: Homer, Iliad, selections
            Wednesday: Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”
            Friday: Violence and Aesthetics: view and discuss Homer in film (video selections)

WEEK THREE: September 6-10
Writing Violence: Trauma & Memory
            Monday: Labor Day Holiday, NO CLASS
            Wednesday: Morrison, Beloved, pp. 1-165
            Friday: Morrison, Beloved, pp. 169-275

WEEK FOUR: September 13-17
            Writing Violence: Critical Histories of Violence
            Monday: Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, pp-1-116
            Wednesday: Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, pp 116-186
            Friday: View and discuss “Hearts and Minds” (1974) (film selections)
            ***Draft of first writing assignment due***

WEEK FIVE: September 20-24
Monday: Peer Review
            Wednesday: Library Tour
            Friday: Violence and the Problem of Sources
            ***Revised version of first writing assignment due***

WEEK SIX: September 27-Oct. 1
Analysis and Explanation: State Violence and Genocide
            Monday: Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, pp 1-99
            Wednesday: Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, pp 101-153
            Friday: Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life”

WEEK SEVEN: October 4-8
Analysis and Explanation: Violence, Sexuality, and Gender
            Monday: View film, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” (2008) prt. I
            Wednesday: View film, “The Stoning of Soraya M.” (2008) prt. II
            Friday: Joan Scott, “Gender A Useful Category of Analysis”

WEEK EIGHT: October 11-15
Analysis and Explanation: Everyday Violence
            Monday: P. Farmer, "An Anthropology of Structural Violence"
            Wednesday: P. Bourdieu, Structural Violence
            Friday: EP Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd”

WEEK NINE: October 18-22
Analysis and Explanation: Popular Violence
            Monday: Corbin, Village of Cannibals, pp 1-60
                ***Draft of second writing assignment due***
            Wednesday: Peer Review
            Friday: Corbin, Village of Cannibals, pp 61-119
            ***Revised copy of second writing assignment handed in.***

WEEK TEN: October 25-29
Analysis and Explanation: Colonialism and Dirty Wars
            Monday: Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, selections
            Wednesday: Brower, A Desert Named Peace, selections
            Friday: Priya Satia, “The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia”

WEEK ELEVEN: November 1-5
Rethinking Political Violence Today
            Monday: Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (In Full)
            Wednesday: Project Presentations
            Friday: Project Presentations

WEEK TWELVE: November 8-12
           Monday: Project Presentations
            Wednesday: Project Presentations
            Friday: Project Presentations
           ***Draft of Final Paper Due***

WEEK THIRTEEN: November 15-19
Monday-Friday:
            No Class, Individual Paper Consultations

WEEK FOURTEEN: November 22-26
            Monday: Writing Progress Discussion
            Wednesday: Writing Progress Discussion
            Friday: Thanksgiving Holiday

WEEK FIFTEEN: November 29-Dec. 3
            Monday: Film “War Photographer” (2001)
            Friday: Conclusion
***FINAL PAPER DUE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3***

This course contains a Writing flag.

French Empire: The “West” and “Islam.”
HIS 364G- 9460/ISL 372- 41510
Fall 2010

Instructor: Benjamin C. Brower                                                 Telephone: 512-475-6813
Office: Garrison 0.116                                                             Email: benbrower@mail.utexas.edu
Office Hours: M 10:15-11:45; W 3:00-4:00,                        Class Meeting Times: MWF 1:00-2:00pm
and by appointment                                                                        Meeting Place: WAG 420

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

Modern French imperialism advanced its claims to global power through a division of the world into a two parts. On one hand was a space of civilization and modernity and, on the other, there was a primitive space inhabited by people who needed to be liberated or dominated. In the Mediterranean world this thinking erected a frontier running across the middle of the sea. In the north there was the “West” or “Europe,” and in the south there was the “East” or “Islam.” The West, represented by France, was construed as the conveyor of modern values and progress, while the East was a place of archaism and reaction that needed to be renewed, by force if necessary. French thinkers called this the “civilizing mission,” and it justified France’s colonization of Muslim countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many parts of this thinking have survived the colonial era and mark attitudes in contemporary, post-colonial France. Religion is generally offered as the decisive category determining these divisions, with the Muslim societies of Africa and the Middle East set off as somehow essentially different and incompatible with France and its Christian or secular traditions.

Paying special attention to the religious and secular dimensions of the problem, our work in this course will critically consider how these cultural and political frontiers developed, and their use in contests for power. The focus will be on modern France and the Middle Eastern countries that fell under French rule in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly Algeria, but the course will examine these questions within a broader trans-national context across several historical periods.

COURSE OBJECTIVES: Students will learn the skills of historical analysis and interpretation, along with the empirical material associated with the course itself. This will include the ability to grasp the complexity of historical debates and rethink received understandings and concepts in light of new evidence. Coursework and evaluations will focus on students’ ability to articulate coherent and sustained arguments in writing and verbally. There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally associated with a course of this level.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

You will need to purchase the following books or use reserve copies in library.

• Kateb Yacine, Nedjma (University of Virginia Press, 2001). ISBN-13: 978-0813913131
• Anonymous, The Song of Roland (Penguin, 1990) ISBN-13: 978-0140445329
• Abdellah Hammoudi, A Season in Mecca: Narrative of a Pilgrimage (Hill and Wang, 2006) ISBN-13:978-0809076093
• Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979) ISBN: 039474067X
• Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton UP, 2007) ISBN: 0691125430
• Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot, Venice and the Sublime Port (Cornell UP, 2009) ISBN:0801475430

Additional required readings, as noted in schedule of class meetings, will be distributed electronically or placed on library reserve.

Other: Required material in the course also includes music, photographs, films and various visual texts such as music videos that will be played/projected in class.

COURSE RULES:

• Laptops are to be used only for taking notes. Students are expected to disable the Internet accessibility function of all electronic devises used in class. Thus there will be no use of email, web browsers, or other software that accesses the Internet during our meetings. If you would like the record the lectures, please see me first.
• Cell phone use of any sort, including text messages, will not be tolerated.

ASSIGNMENTS:

• •Exams: There will be one midterm and a comprehensive final exam. Both exams will consist of analytical ID’s and essays. A list of potential ID’s and questions will be available to help prepare for the exams. You will be expected to respond with material from the readings and lectures. SEE BELOW FOR EXAM DATES.

Writing Assignment: You will prepare a historiographical essay. This will be an analysis of debates concerning Edward Said’s book Orientalism. The essay will deal with Said’s argument and evidence in the book itself and critically evaluate three outside reviews of it. Your task is to work through the significant controversies concerning Orientalism and examine the role of interpretation in the production of historical knowledge. More details will be given in class (7pp. minimum. DUE DATE: Monday, November 16).

Discussion Questions: Much of our course work will center on readings and discussions (about one each week). You are required to prepare in advance a question for our discussion. These will be typed and turned in. During discussions, each student will pose their question.

GRADES:
Midterm            25%
Final Exam            35%
Writing            25%
Participation            15%

Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course. The grade scale is as follows: 100-93% = A; 92-90% = A- ; 89-87% = B+ ; 86-83% = B ; 82-80% = B- ; 79-77% = C+ ; 76-73% = C ; 72-70% = C- ; 69-67% = D+ ; 66-63% = D ; 62-60% = D- ; below 60% = F.

ATTENDANCE:

• Attendance, preparation, and active participation in all course sessions are mandatory.
• Please familiarize yourself with the University’s policy concerning excused absences. Unexcused absences will impinge upon your final grade: 2 unexcused absences will result in the loss of 1 full letter grade; more than 4 will result in loss of 2 full letter grades.
• Religious Holy Days: By University policy, please notify me of your pending absence fourteen days prior to the anticipated date of observance of religious holy days. If you must miss a class, an examination, or an assignment, for religious observance, I will give you an opportunity to complete the missed work within a reasonable time after the absence.

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS HONOR CODE:

The core values of The University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the university is expected to uphold these values through integrity, honesty, trust, fairness, and respect toward peers and community.

All work for this course will be that of the student and original contributions. Writing done for a previous course cannot be used to fulfill assignments in this course. I militantly pursue cases of suspected plagiarism and cheating.

*** Late assignments are penalized, plagiarism is prosecuted***

DISABILITIES:
The University of Texas at Austin provides upon request appropriate academic accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. For more information, contact Services for Students with Disabilities at 471-6259 (voice) or 232-2937 (video phone).

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE OF CLASS MEETINGS, Fall 2010
(Subject to Revisions and Changes)

WEEK ONE: August 25 & 27
            Wednesday: Introduction
            Friday: The Question of Borders

WEEK TWO: August 30-Sept. 3
The Early Example of Muslims in Europe
            Monday, Concepts: “Europe” and “Islam”
            Wednesday, The “Covivencia” in Medieval Spain Debate
            Friday, Minorities and the Reconquista

WEEK THREE: September 6-10
The Question of Civilizations
            Monday, No Class, Labor Day Holiday
            Wednesday, The Crusades
            Friday, Discussion: Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”

WEEK FOUR: September 13-17
“Les Croisades”or “al-h?uru?b al-s?ali?biyya”: The Crusades and their Memory
            Monday, The “Saracen”
            Wednesday, Discussion: The Song of Rolland (IN FULL)
            Friday, The Crusader Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century

WEEK FIVE: September 20-24
Early Modern Mediterranean Encounters
            Monday, Europe and the Ottoman Empire, pt. 1
            Wednesday, Europe and the Ottoman Empire, pt.
            Friday, Discussion: Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot (IN FULL)

WEEK SIX: September 27-Oct. 1
European Imperialism
            Monday, Bonaparte in Egypt pt. 1
            Wednesday, Bonaparte in Egypt pt. 2: Slides, The Description of Egypt
            Friday, Discussion: al-Jabarti, Napoleon In Egypt (selections)

WEEK SEVEN: October 4-8
The Colonial Experience in Algeria
            Monday, Algeria, 1830–1962
            Wednesday, Discussion: Kateb Yacine, Nedjma pt. 1
            Friday, Discussion: Kateb Yacine, Nedjma pt. 2

WEEK EIGHT: October 11-15
Republican France and Muslim Reformers
           Monday, Discussion: The Renan and al-Afghani debate, 1883
            Wednesday, Marianne and the Prophet
            Friday, The Islamic Reform Movement and the Republic

WEEK NINE: October 18-22
Monday, Review
            Wednesday, ***MID TERM EXAM***
            Friday, How to Read Orientalism, Theory and Method

WEEK TEN: October 25-29
Representations and Power
            Monday, European Orientalism in Image and Text
            Wednesday, Discussion: Said, Orientalism pt. 1 (pp. xv.-110)
            Friday, Discussion: Said, Orientalism, pt. 2 (pp. 284-352)

WEEK ELEVEN: November 1-5
Globalized Islam
            Monday, Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places
            Wednesday, Discussion: Abdellah Hammoudi, A Season in Mecca (Chpt. 1 pp. 3-8; Chpts. 2-6 in full;and Chpt
9 in full. Total ca. 150pp.)
            Friday, Immigration and Islam in France

WEEK TWELVE: November 8-12
The Post-Colonial Era: Muslims in France, France and its Muslims
Monday, A New World Order?: Post-Cold War Society and Racism
Wednesday, Discussion: Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant (selections)
Friday, Music Videos: Dahmane El Harrachi, “Ya Rayah” (ca. 1975) & 113, “Princes de la ville”
(2000) “Banlieu” (2005)

WEEK THIRTEEN: November 15-19
Assimilation, Integration and the Right to be Different
            Monday, French Secularism pt. 1
                ***Orientalism Papers Due, Monday, November 15***
            Wednesday, French Secularism pt. 2
            Friday, Film: “La Haine” (1995), pt. 1

 WEEK FOURTEEN: November 22-26
            Monday, Discussion: Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (IN FULL)
            Wednesday, Film: “La Haine” (1995), pt. 2
            Friday: Thanksgiving Holiday

WEEK FIFTEEN: November 29-Dec. 3
New Citizens in Old Europe
            Monday, Review
            Wednesday, Discussion: E. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (selections)
            Friday, Conclusion

***FINAL EXAM: Tuesday, December 14, 9:00-12:00 noon***

INTRODUCTION TO MODERN ALGERIA

HIS 364G- 39813/ MES 323K- 42247

                  Spring 2010

Instructor: Benjamin C. Brower

Office: Garrison 0.116

Office Hours: M 10:15-11:45; W 3:00-4:00, and by appointment

Telephone: 512-475-6994

Email: benbrower@mail.utexas.edu

Class Meeting Times: MWF 9:00-10:00pm

Meeting Place: PAR 1 

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This course presents the major themes of Algerian history from the sixteenth century to today. This story begins in 1516 and the Ottoman period, when formidable fleets of Algerian corsairs struggled with Spanish, French, and even American ships in the “jihad al-bahr” (jihad at sea). The course ends after a grueling but brilliantly won war of national liberation against colonial France (1954-62) became a revolution betrayed, when Algeria entered a period of terrorism in the 1990s. Algeria’s history intersects several fields of study (European, African, and Middle Eastern studies) and it is a country that has been home to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, speaking many different languages. The course seeks to give expression to these multi-religious and multi-linguistic traditions. Therefore, students should be ready to cross methodological and cultural borders.

COURSE OBJECTIVES: 

Students will learn the skills of historical analysis and interpretation, along with the material described above. This will include the ability to grasp the complexity of historical debates and rethink received knowledge and concepts in light of new evidence.  Coursework and evaluations will focus on students’ ability to articulate coherent and sustained arguments in writing and verbally.  There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally associated with a course of this level.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

You will need to purchase the following books or use reserve copies in library.

1. Henri Alleg, The Question (Bison Books, 2006), ISBN: 0803259603
2. Assia Djebar, Algerian White (Seven Stories Press, 2003) ISBN: 1583225161.
3. 3.     Mouloud Feraoun, The Poor Man's Son: Menrad, Kabyle Schoolteacher (University of Virginia Press, 2005).  ISBN: 0813923263
4. Rachid Mimouni, The Honor of the Tribe: A Novel (William Morrow, 1992) 0688097464
5. John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Indiana University Press, 2005) ISBN: 0253217822

Additional required readings noted in schedule of class meetings will be distributed electronically or placed on library reserve. 

Other: Required material in the course also includes music, photographs, films and various visual texts such as music videos.

COURSE RULES:

• Students are expected to disable the Internet accessibility function of all electronic devises used in class.
• Cell phone use of any sort will not be tolerated.

ASSIGNMENTS:

• Exams: There will be one midterm and a comprehensive final exam.  These exams will consist of analytical ID’s and essays.  A list of potential ID’s and questions will be distributed to prepare for the exams.  SEE BELOW FOR DATES.
• Short response papers: In these papers you are asked to write four brief papers on the each of the books (Alleg, Djebar, Feraoun, Mimouni) we will read. You will summarize and analyze how each fits into the themes of Algerian history. Length: 2-3 pp., double-spaced, 12 pnt. font. Proofread carefully: correct use of language is expected and will figure in grading. Due dates: in the class meeting scheduled for discussion of each book.

Grades:

Midterm                        25%                       

Final Exam                        35%

Writing                        25%

Participation                        15%

Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course.  The grade scale is as follows:

100-93% = A; 92-90% = A- ; 89-87% = B+ ; 86-83% = B ; 82-80% = B- ; 79-77% = C+ ; 76-73% = C ; 72-70% = C- ; 69-67% = D+ ; 66-63% = D ; 62-60% = D- ; below 60% = F.

ATTENDANCE:

• Attendance, preparation, and active participation in all course sessions are mandatory.
• Please familiarize yourself with the University’s policy concerning excused absences. Unexcused absences will impinge upon your final grade: 2 unexcused absences will result in the loss of 1 full letter grade; more than 4 will result in loss of 2 full letter grades.
• Religious Holy Days: By University policy, please notify me of your pending absence fourteen days prior to the anticipated date of observance of religious holy days. If you must miss a class, an examination, or an assignment, for religious observance, I will give you an opportunity to complete the missed work within a reasonable time after the absence.

University of Texas Honor Code

The core values of The University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the university is expected to uphold these values through integrity, honesty, trust, fairness, and respect toward peers and community. 

All work for this course will be that of the student and original contributions. I militantly pursue cases of suspected plagiarism and cheating.

*** Late assignments are penalized, plagiarism is prosecuted***

Disabilities

The University of Texas at Austin provides accommodations for students with disabilities. Contact Services for Students with Disabilities at 471-6259 or 232-2937 (video phone).

TENTATIVE SCHEDULE OF CLASS MEETINGS

(Subject to Revisions and Changes)

WEEK ONE: January 20 & 22

Introduction

Wednesday: Introduction

Friday:  The Question of Borders           

WEEK TWO: January 25-29

Algeria and the Mediterranean World

Monday, Space and Time in the Maghreb

Wednesday, Algerian Geography 

Friday, The Sahara

WEEK THREE: February 1-5

Ottoman Algeria and the World around It

Monday, Discussion: Braudel, “The Longue Durée” 

Wednesday, Algeria’s Cities

Friday, Mediterranean Trade

WEEK FOUR: February 8-12 (Read Reudy, pp. 1-44)

Ottoman Algeria and the Jihad at Sea

Monday, “Christians of Allah”: Captives and Slaves

Wednesday, Discussion: “Captivity Narratives”

Friday, Uncle Sam in Barbary and the Barbary Wars 

WEEK FIVE: February 22-26 (Read Reudy, pp. 45-)

The French Invasion & Algerian Responses, 1830-39

Monday, Prelude: Bonaparte in Egypt

Wednesday, The French Revolution and the End of Ottoman Algeria

Friday, Algerian Notables React

WEEK SIX: March 1-5 (Read Reudy, pp. -79)

The Total Conquest of Algeria, 1839-57

Monday, Extermination, Expulsion, or Accommodation: The “Indigenous Question”

Wednesday, Discussion: “Abdelkader on Jihad”

Friday, The Conquest of the Sahara

WEEK SEVEN: March 8-12

Monday, Mid-Term Review

Wednesday, ***MID TERM EXAM***

Friday, Historians views of French Empire

WEEK EIGHT: March 15-19

Spring Break

WEEK NINE: March 22-26 (Read Reudy, pp. 80-113)

Colonial Governmentality, 1871-1930

 Monday, The Land Question & the Saint Simonians

Wednesday, France’s Nationalization of Islam & the “Arab Kingdom”

Friday, French Algeria at 100 years, the 1830 Centenary

WEEK TEN: March 29-April 2 (Read Reudy, pp. 114-155)

Reform Movements & The Rise of Nationalism

Monday, Emir Khaled & the Young Algerians 

Wednesday, Discussion: Mouloud Feraoun, The Poor Man's Son (IN FULL) 

Friday, Islamic Reform Movement & Algerian Nationalists

WEEK ELEVEN: April 5-9 (Read Reudy, pp. 156-194)

The Algerian War of Independence, 1954-62

Monday, Why War?

Wednesday, Discussion: Alleg, The Question

Friday, The FLN’s Military and Diplomatic Victory

WEEK TWELVE: April 12-16 (Read Reudy, pp. 195-230)

The Triumphs and Trials of Independence

Monday, The FLN State and Society 

Wednesday, Ben Bella to Boumedienne

Friday, Discussion: Mimouni, The Honor of the Tribe (IN FULL)

Film: Omar Gatlato (Directed by M. Allouache, 1976), screening time TBA

WEEK THIRTEEN: April 19-23

Algeria’s Other Wilaya: France

Monday, Algerian Immigration to France, Emigration from Algeria 

Wednesday, Post-Colonial France and Its Muslims

Friday, Music Videos: Dahmane El Harrachi, “Ya Raya” & 113, “Princes de la ville” (2000) “Banlieu” (2005)

WEEK FOURTEEN: April 26-30 (Read Reudy, pp. 231-288)

Years of Terror 1988-1999

Monday, The Unraveling: October 1988 & Rise of the Islamist Opposition

Wednesday, A Civil War or a War on Civilians?

Friday, Discussion: Djebar, Algerian White [IN FULL]

Film: Bab El-Oued City (Directed by M. Allouache, 1994), screening time TBA 

WEEK FIFTEEN: May 3-7

Conclusion: Algeria at a Global Crossroad

Monday, Neo-Liberalism and the Revolutionary Legacy: The Harraga

Wednesday, Blowback: Al-Qaeda and the “War on Terror” in Algeria

Friday, Conclusion

***FINAL EXAM Wednesday, May 12, 7:00–10:00 pm***

                                                   Writing Violence in History
                                                       HIST 350L-40066
                                                             Fall 2009

Instructor: Benjamin C. Brower
Office: Garrison 0.116 (temp. office until 30 September: Garrison 0.112)
Office Hours: M 10:15-11:45; W 4:00-5:00, and by appointment
Telephone: 512-475-6994
Email: benbrower@mail.utexas.edu
Class Meeting Times: MWF 9:00-10:00am
Meeting Place: PAR 103

COURSE DESCRIPTION & OBJECTIVES:
Violence has been a constant feature of history yet it is a topic that historians have had trouble understanding and explaining.  Endemic and problematic, violence is also ever changing and many hued, making its study especially difficult. This seminar will focus on the skills necessary for the historian working on violent phenomena.  We shall examine how historians themselves have approached episodes of violence, but we will also look outside of the discipline of history to see how psychoanalysts, anthropologists, novelists, and activists have both understood violence and how they represent it in their work. This is a research and writing course.  Its objectives are threefold: learn the methodologies required for the interdisciplinary study of violence, develop experience working in primary historical sources, and master advanced writing skills. There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally required for a course of this level.

REQUIRED TEXTS:
You will need to purchase the following books or use reserve copies in the library.
•    Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (Columbia University Press: 2007). ISBN 0231141521.
•    Alain Corbin, Village of Cannibals (Harvard University Press: 2006). ISBN 0674939018.
•    Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New Press, 2003).  ISBN 1565848160.
•    Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage, 2004). ISBN 1400033411.
•    Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence (New Press, 2003). ISBN 1565847881.
•    Georges Vigarello, A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the 16th to the 20th Century (Polity Press, 2001), ISBN: 0745621708.
Additional required readings, as noted in schedule of class meetings, will be distributed electronically or placed on library reserve.  
Other: Required material in the course also includes several films and video clips that will be screened in class.

COURSE RULES:
•    Students are expected to disable the Internet accessibility function of all electronic devises used in class.
•    Cell phone use of any sort will not be tolerated.

ASSIGNMENTS:
I. Writing: There will be two short writing assignments and a final research paper.  There is no final exam. Additional informal writing exercises will be assigned periodically during the semester.
  1. Two Short Papers: Each of these will help you prepare the conceptualization and execution of the final paper.  In the first writing assignment, you will discuss some of the problems related to writing the history of violence as seen in our first group of readings.  In the second assignment you will provide a research proposal and bibliography for your final paper.  Each of these papers will go through a process of peer review of a first draft, revision, and evaluation and grading by the instructor.  More details will be given in class. The due dates are listed below.
  Alternate Project for Short Paper #2: Complete a full application for the Undergraduate Research Fellowship at UT.   See guidelines at http://www.utexas.edu/research/attach/admin/awards/URF0910App.pdf .
This project can then be submitted to the Awards Committee for actual consideration in the Spring Semester; the awards go up to $1,000.  The deadline is Monday, 1 February 2010.
   2. Final Paper: This will be a major piece of research and writing.  You are expected to undertake a substantial research project focused on a topic and group of historical sources of your choosing.  You will receive instructor review and commentary on a rough draft before turning in a final version 15-20 pages in length.  The due date is our last class meeting, as indicated below.
II. Discussions and Presentations:
  1.  All students are expected to be prepared for discussions.  This means having completed the assigned readings and coming with questions to pose to the text that we can work through as a group.  Students who fail this will be score poorly in participation points.  Shyness is not an excuse for failing to participate.  If it becomes clear that students as a group are not prepared for discussions, they will be required to hand in short written summaries of the readings and turn in written discussion questions at the beginning of our meeting.
  2. You will make a short presentation on your final project in class on the dates indicated below.  Presenters will briefly describe their interests, goals, and sources, and the audience is expected to respond with helpful, critical questions and commentary.  Your grades will be based both on your oral presentation, and on the feedback you offer to your colleagues.  
III. Instructor Meetings:
All students are strongly encouraged to meet with me during the course of the semester with any questions and concerns.  A required individual conference will take place after turning in the rough draft of the final paper.  In this meeting we will discuss revisions for the final paper.

GRADES:
Two Short Papers:  30% (15% each)        
Final Essay            50%
Presentation          10%
Participation          10%
Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course.  The grade scale is as follows:
100-93% = A; 92-90% = A- ; 89-87% = B+ ; 86-83% = B ; 82-80% = B- ; 79-77% = C+ ; 76-73% = C ; 72-70% = C- ; 69-67% = D+ ; 66-63% = D ; 62-60% = D- ; below 60% = F.

Extensions: Students who need an extension on the writing assignment must consult me prior to the deadline. Extensions will be granted only in the case of exceptional circumstances, as well as documented illness, official university events, religious holy days, and for other university-excused reasons. All unapproved late essays will be subject to a penalty of 1/3 of the final grade during the first seven days, after that half of the grade will be lost.

ATTENDENCE:
•    This is a seminar: Attendance, preparation, and active participation in all course sessions are mandatory.
•    Please familiarize yourself with the University’s policy concerning excused absences. Unexcused absences as well as lack of preparation and tardiness will impinge upon your final grade: 2 unexcused absences will result in the loss of 1 full letter grade; more than 4 will result in loss of 2 full letter grades.
•    Religious Holy Days: By UT Austin policy, please notify me of your pending absence fourteen days prior to the anticipated date of observance of religious holy days. If you must miss a class, an examination, or an assignment for religious observance, I will give you an opportunity to complete the missed work within a reasonable time after the absence.

University of Texas Honor Code
The core values of The University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the university is expected to uphold these values through integrity, honesty, trust, fairness, and respect toward peers and community.  
   All work for this course will be that of the student and original contributions. Writing done for a previous course cannot be used to fulfill assignments in this course. I militantly pursue cases of suspected plagiarism and cheating.
              *** Late assignments are penalized, plagiarism is prosecuted***

Documented Disabilities
The University of Texas at Austin provides upon request appropriate academic accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. For more information, contact Services for Students with Disabilities at 471-6259 (voice) or 232-2937 (video phone).

                                 TENTATIVE SCHEDULE OF CLASS MEETINGS, Fall 2009
                                              (Subject to Revisions and Changes)
WEEK ONE: August 26 & 28
  Wednesday: Introduction
  Friday: Defining Violence

WEEK TWO:  August 31-Sept. 4
Writing Violence: The Problem of Representation
  Monday: Homer, Iliad, selections
  Wednesday: Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”
  Friday: Aestheticized violence: view and discuss Homer in film (video selections)

WEEK THREE: September 7-11
Writing Violence: Trauma & Memory
  Monday: Labor Day Holiday, No Class
  Wednesday: Morrison, Beloved, pp. 1-165
  Friday: Morrison, Beloved, pp. 169-275

WEEK FOUR: September 14-18
Writing Violence: Critical Histories of Violence
  Monday: Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, pp-1-116
  Wednesday: Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, pp 116-186
  Friday: View and discuss “Hearts and Minds” (1974) (video selections)
***Draft of first writing assignment due***

WEEK FIVE: September 21-25
  Monday: Peer Review
  Wednesday: [Brower at The New School]
  Friday: [Brower at Cornell University]
***Revised copy handed in***

WEEK SIX: September 28-Oct. 2
Understanding and Explanation: State Violence and Genocide
  Monday: Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, pp 1-99
  Wednesday: Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, pp 101-153
  Friday: Freud and Einstein’s letters on war and peace

WEEK SEVEN: October 5-9
Understanding and Explanation: Violence, Sexuality, and Gender
  Monday: Vigarello, A History of Rape, pp. 1-110
  Wednesday: Vigarello, A History of Rape, pp. 166-244
  Friday: Joan Scott, “Gender A Useful Category of Analysis”

WEEK EIGHT: October 12-16
Understanding and Explanation: Everyday Violence
  Monday: P. Farmer, "An Anthropology of Structural Violence"
  Wednesday: P. Bourdieu, Structural Violence
  Friday: EP Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd”

WEEK NINE: October 19-23
Understanding and Explanation: Popular Violence
  Monday: Corbin, Village of Cannibals, pp 1-60
***Draft of second writing assignment due***
  Wednesday: Peer Review
  Friday: Corbin, Village of Cannibals, pp 61-119
***Revised copy handed in.***

WEEK TEN: October 26-30
Understanding and Explanation: Colonialism and Dirty Wars
  Monday: Brower, A Desert Named Peace, introduction
  Wednesday: Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, selections
  Friday: Henri Aleg, The Question, selections

WEEK ELEVEN: November 2-6
Rethinking Political Violence Today
  Monday: Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, pp. 1-38
  Wednesday: Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing, pp. 39-96
  Friday: Project Presentations

WEEK TWELVE: November 9-13
  Monday: Project Presentations
  Wednesday: Project Presentations
  Friday: Project Presentations
***Draft of Final Paper Due***

WEEK THIRTEEN: November 16-20
  Monday-Friday:
      No Class, Instructor Meetings by Appointment

WEEK FOURTEEN: November 23-27
    Monday: [Brower at Middle East Studies Association]
    Wednesday: [Brower at Middle East Studies Association]
    Friday: Thanksgiving Holiday

WEEK FIFTEEN: November 30-Dec. 4
    Monday: Film “War Photographer” (2001)
     December 4, Conclusion
***FINAL PAPER DUE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4***

                                          French Empire: The “West” and “Islam.”
                                                      HIS 364G-40169
                                                             Fall 2009

Instructor: Benjamin C. Brower
Office: Garrison 0.116 (temp. office until 30 September: Garrison 0.112)
Office Hours: M 10:15-11:45; W 4:00-5:00, and by appointment
Telephone: 512-475-6994
Email: benbrower@mail.utexas.edu
Class Meeting Times: MWF 3:00-4:00pm
Meeting Place: WAG 420

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Modern French imperialism advanced its claims to global power through a division of the world into a place of civilization and barbarians, with France justifying its domination in terms of a so-called civilizing mission. In the Mediterranean region this thinking erected a frontier between two places, generally called the “West” and “East,” or “Europe” and “Islam.” The West, represented by France, was construed as the conveyor of modern values and progress while the East was a place of archaism and reaction that needed to be renewed or liberated.  Many parts of this thinking survived the colonial era and mark contemporary post-colonial societies. Religion is generally offered as the decisive calculus determining these divisions, with the Muslim societies of North Africa and the Middle East set off as somehow essentially different from France’s Christian or secular traditions.

Playing special attention to the religious and secular dimensions of the problem, our work in this course will critically consider the development of these cultural and political frontiers, and their use in the contests for power in the region. The focus will be on modern France and the Middle Eastern countries that fell under French rule in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly Algeria, but the course will examine these questions within a broader trans-national Mediterranean context across several historical periods.

COURSE OBJECTIVES:
Students will learn the skills of historical analysis and interpretation, along with the material associated with the course itself. This will include the ability to grasp the complexity of historical debates and rethink received understandings and concepts in light of new evidence.  Coursework and evaluations will focus on students’ ability to articulate coherent and sustained arguments in writing and verbally.  There are no pre-requisites beyond those generally associated with a course of this level.

REQUIRED TEXTS
You will need to purchase the following books or use reserve copies in library.
•    Mouloud Feraoun, The Poor Man's Son: Menrad, Kabyle Schoolteacher (University of Virginia Press, 2005).  ISBN: 0813923263
•    ?Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, Napoleon In Egypt: Al-Jabarti's Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798. (Markus Wiener Publishers, 1993) ISBN: 1558763376
•    Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1979) ISBN: 039474067X
•    Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton UP, 2007) ISBN: 0691125430
•    Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot, Venice and the Sublime Port (Cornell UP, 2009) ISBN: 0801475430
Additional required readings noted in schedule of class meetings will be distributed electronically or placed on library reserve.  
Other: Required material in the course also includes music, photographs, films and various visual texts such as music videos that will be played/projected in class.


COURSE RULES:
•    Students are expected to disable the Internet accessibility function of all electronic devises used in class.
•    Cell phone use of any sort will not be tolerated.

ASSIGNMENTS
•    Exams: There will be one midterm and a comprehensive final exam.  These exams will consist of analytical ID’s and essays.  A list of potential ID’s and questions will be available to help prepare for the exams. You will be expected to respond with material from the readings and lectures.  SEE BELOW FOR DATES.
•    Writing Assignment: You will prepare a historiographical essay. This will be an analysis of debates concerning Edward Said’s Orientalism.  The essay will deal with Said’s argument and evidence itself and three outside reviews.  Your task is to work through the significant controversies concerning Orientalism and examine the role of interpretation in the production of historical knowledge.  More details will be given in class (7pp. minimum.  DUE DATE: Monday, November 16).
•    Discussion Questions: Much of our course work will center on readings and discussions (about one each week).  You are required to prepare in advance a question for our discussion.  These will be typed and turned in. During discussions, each student will pose their question.

Grades:
  Midterm       25%        
  Final Exam   35%
  Writing         25%
  Participation  15%
Plus/Minus grading will be used for all grading in this course.  The grade scale is as follows:
100-93% = A; 92-90% = A- ; 89-87% = B+ ; 86-83% = B ; 82-80% = B- ; 79-77% = C+ ; 76-73% = C ; 72-70% = C- ; 69-67% = D+ ; 66-63% = D ; 62-60% = D- ; below 60% = F.

ATTENDENCE:
•    Attendance, preparation, and active participation in all course sessions are mandatory.
•    Please familiarize yourself with the University’s policy concerning excused absences. Unexcused absences will impinge upon your final grade: 2 unexcused absences will result in the loss of 1 full letter grade; more than 4 will result in loss of 2 full letter grades.
•    Religious Holy Days: By University policy, please notify me of your pending absence fourteen days prior to the anticipated date of observance of religious holy days. If you must miss a class, an examination, or an assignment, for religious observance, I will give you an opportunity to complete the missed work within a reasonable time after the absence.

University of Texas Honor Code
The core values of The University of Texas at Austin are learning, discovery, freedom, leadership, individual opportunity, and responsibility. Each member of the university is expected to uphold these values through integrity, honesty, trust, fairness, and respect toward peers and community.  
     All work for this course will be that of the student and original contributions. Writing done for a previous course cannot be used to fulfill assignments in this course. I militantly pursue cases of suspected plagiarism and cheating.
*** Late assignments are penalized, plagiarism is prosecuted***

Documented Disabilities
The University of Texas at Austin provides upon request appropriate academic accommodations for qualified students with disabilities. For more information, contact Services for Students with Disabilities at 471-6259 (voice) or 232-2937 (video phone).

                                  TENTATIVE SCHEDULE OF CLASS MEETINGS, Fall 2009
                                             (Subject to Revisions and Changes)
WEEK ONE: August 26 & 28
   Wednesday: Introduction
   Friday:  The Question of Borders    

WEEK TWO:  August 31-Sept. 4
The Early Example of Muslims in Europe
  Monday, Mediterranean Geography and the Longue Durée
  Wednesday, Muslims in Medieval Spain, or Ahl al-Andalus (the People of Andalusia)
  Friday, The Reconquista

WEEK THREE: September 7-11
The Question of Civilizations
  Monday, No Class, Labor Day Holiday
  Wednesday, Discussion: Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”
  Friday, Concepts, “Europe” and “Islam”

WEEK FOUR: September 14-18
Early Modern Mediterranean Encounters and The Foundations of Modern Empire: Bonaparte in Egypt
  Monday, Discussion: Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot (IN FULL)
  Wednesday, Bonaparte in Egypt pt. 1
  Friday, Bonaparte in Egypt pt. 2  

WEEK FIVE: September 21-25
European Imperialism
  Monday, Bonaparte in Egypt pt. 3.  Slides, The Description of Egypt
  Wednesday, [Brower at The New School]
  Friday, [Brower at Cornell University]

WEEK SIX: September 28-Oct. 2
Algeria and French Empire
  Monday, Discussion: al-Jabarti, Napoleon In Egypt (pp. 1-118)
  Wednesday, Ottoman Algeria, 16th century - 1830
  Friday, The Force of Empire, Algeria 1830-47

WEEK SEVEN: October 5-9
The Colonial Experience in Algeria
  Monday, Algeria, 1848 – 1954
  Wednesday, Discussion: Mouloud Feraoun, The Poor Man's Son (IN FULL)
  Friday, The End of French Empire

WEEK EIGHT: October 12-16
Decolonization
  Monday, The Algerian War of Independence, 1954-62
  Wednesday, Discussion: Albert Camus, “The Guest” & Franz Fanon, “Letter to a Frenchman”
  Friday, Film: “The Battle of Algiers” Part 1

WEEK NINE: October 19-23
  Monday, Film: “The Battle of Algiers” Part 2
  Wednesday, ***MID TERM EXAM***
  Friday, Reading Orientalism, Theory and Method

WEEK TEN: October 26-30
Representations and Power
  Monday, The Grand Tour in the Mediterranean
  Wednesday, Discussion: Said, Orientalism pt. 1 (pages To Be Announced)
  Friday, Discussion: Said, Orientalism, pt. 2

WEEK ELEVEN: November 2-6
Muslims in Motion
 Monday, Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places
 Wednesday, Discussion: Abdellah Hammoudi, A Season in Mecca (Chpt. 1 pp. 3-8; Chpts. 2-6 in full; and Chpt 9 in full. Total ca. 150pp.)
 Friday, Immigration and Islam in Europe

WEEK TWELVE: November 9-13
The Post-Colonial Era: Muslims in Europe, Europe and its Muslims
 Monday, A New World Order?: Post-Cold War Society and European Racism
 Wednesday, Discussion: Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant (selections) & Bernard Lewis, “Legal and  Historical Reflections on the Position of Muslim Populations under Non-Muslim Rule”
 Friday, Music and Music Videos: Dahmane El Harrachi, “Ya Raya” & 113, “Princes de la ville” (2000) “Banlieu” (2005)

WEEK THIRTEEN: November 16-20
Assimilation, Integration and the Right to be Different
  Monday, French Secularism pt. 1
***Orientalism Papers Due, Monday, November 16***
  Wednesday, French Secularism pt. 2
  Friday, Discussion: Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (IN FULL)

WEEK FOURTEEN: November 23-27
  Monday, [Brower at Middle East Studies Association]
  Wednesday, [Brower at Middle East Studies Association]
  Friday: Thanksgiving Holiday

WEEK FIFTEEN: November 30-Dec. 4
New Citizens in Old Europe
  Monday, Review
  Wednesday, Discussion: J. Bhabha, “Identity, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Europe” & E. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (selections)
  Friday, Conclusion

***FINAL EXAM: Tuesday, December 15, 2:00–5:00 pm***