Corso di laurea magistrale in Scienze storiche

Storia contemporanea E

Contemporary History in a Comparative Perspective

Anno accademico 2019/2020

Sommario insegnamento

• Obiettivi formativi
• Risultati dell'apprendimento attesi
• Modalità di insegnamento
• Modalità di verifica dell'apprendimento
• Programma
• Testi consigliati e bibliografia
• Note
• Strumenti didattici

Obiettivi formativi

The course, taught fully in English, will examine the contemporary history of non-European/American cultures and contexts. The first part will mainly focus on India and Africa (Sub-Saharan), and will provide the analytical, linguistic, and theoretical frame required to approach non-Western contexts. This conceptual background will be also discussed through specific case studies. 

The second part will focus on the contemporary history of the Middle East and North Africa, giving special attention to the crucial junctures of the region’s ‘long 19^thcentury’, when exceptional circumstances worked to shape the region’s ethno-religious, political, economic and cultural dimensions.

Risultati dell'apprendimento attesi

By the end of the course students should be able to:

-acquire a comparative understanding of contemporary history

-become familiar with the impact of colonialism on national and non-national cultures

-acquire a deeper understanding European colonization and its implications for India, Africa and the Middle East

-get acquainted with contemporary issues that result from “racial”, “tribal”, ethnic, and religious identities

-acquire a gender understanding in relation to local responses to colonial rule.

-enhance their verbal presentation and written skills.

Modalità di insegnamento

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

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

Modalità di verifica dell'apprendimento

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

Class participation 40%

Oral presentations 20%

Final examination 40%

Grading criteria for participation:

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

Grading criteria for oral presentation:

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

Grading criteria for final exam:

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

Students not attending classwork are requested to study the following 3 books and 1 chapter to prepare their final oral exam:

S. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, Random House, Toronto 2014.

S. Press, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa, Harvard UP, Cambridge (MA) 2017.

L. Kamel, The Middle East from Empire to Sealed Identities, Edinburgh UP, Edinburgh 2019.

J. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, Princeton UP, Princeton 2014, only chapter 2.

Programma

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

The following reading list is divided into 12 parts, each corresponding to one lesson. Students are requested to prepare the required readings carefully, in order to be able to participate to class discussions.

Additionally, each week one student (or a group of students, depending on the class size) will be asked to prepare a short oral presentation (about 15 minutes) on one source included in the reading list (see below). Students are prompted to think also about the context in which texts are produced, by whom and for whom they are written, and for which aim, and to assess their potential effects. The list of presentations will be agreed during the first lesson.

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

Suggested reading: J. Osterhammel, Time: When Was the Nineteenth Century? (chapter 2 of J. Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, Princeton UP, Princeton 2014, ch. 2.

Lesson 2: The Age of Imperialism and Colonialism

Required reading: S. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, Random House, Toronto 2014, ch. 12 and R. JC Young, Postcolonial Remains, in “New Literary History”, 43(1), Winter 2012, pp. 19-41.

Presentation delivered by one student: P.M.E. Lorcin, Paradoxical Lives: Women and Their Colonial Worlds (Ch. 1 of P.M.E. Lorcin, Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia, Palgrave, New York 2012). Or: J. Clancy Smith, The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Document, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, pp. 19-32.

Lesson 3: Stereotypes, Religions and Societies

Required reading: Z.Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, Cambridge UP, Cambridge 2010, ch. 6.

Presentation delivered by one student: L. Kamel, The Middle East from Empire to Sealed Identities, Edinburgh UP, Edinburgh 2019, ch. 1.

Lesson 4: India, Africa and the Middle East: History in a Comparative Perspective

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

Presentation delivered by one student: An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914, Oxford UP, Oxford 2006, ch. 1.

Lesson 5: The 'Jewel in the Crown': Approaching Modern India 

Required reading: N. Ferguson, Empire, Basic Books, New York 2004, (only the conclusion); and S. Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, Scribe, London 2017, ch. 1.

Presentation delivered by one student: R. Travers, Imperium in imperio: the East India Company, the British Empire and the revolutions in Bengal (Ch. 1 of R. Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British Bengal, Cambridge UP, Cambridge 2007)

Lesson 6: The “long-19^th century” in Africa

Required reading: S. Press, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa, Harvard UP, Cambridge (MA) 2017, ch. 5.

Presentation delivered by one student: F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York 1963, pp. 7-45; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance, Basic Books, New York 2009, ch. 1.

Lesson 7: The Era of Transformation in the Ottoman Empire

Required reading: J. Clancy Smith, The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Document, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014, pp. 61-73. 

Presentation delivered by one student: L. Kamel, From Empire to Sealed Identities, Edinburgh UP, Edinburgh 2019, ch. 3.

Lesson 8: World War I in the Middle East: Shaping a New Order

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

Presentation delivered by one student: R.G. Suny, A History of the Armenian Genocide, Princeton UP, Princeton 2015, ch. 9.

Lesson 9: Competing Visions and Narratives: a Local-Global Conflict

Required reading: L. Kamel, Israel and a Palestinian State: Redrawing Lines? (ch. 7 of M. Beck, D. Jung, P. Seeberg, The Levant in Turmoil, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2016).

Presentation delivered by one student: N. Caplan, The Israel-Palestine Conflict. Contested Histories, Wiley-Blackwell, Malden 2009, ch. 1. Or: L. Kamel, Whose land? Land tenure in late 19^th and early 20^th century Palestine, «British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies», 41(2), 2014, pp. 230-242.

Lesson 10: The racialization of Nationalisms and the Struggle for Independence

Required reading: S. Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and Crisis of Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, only the Introduction; and P.J. Yearwood, Guarantee of Peace, Oxford UP, Oxford 2009, ch. 1.

Presentation delivered by one student: S. Altorki (ed.), A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, Wiley Blackwell, Chichester 2015, pp. 452-472.

Lesson 11: Stateless nations in the 19^th and 20^th centuries: the Kurdish case and beyond

Required reading: L. Kamel, From Pluralization to Fragmentation: The Kurdish Case from an Historical Perspective, «Nuova Rivista Storica»,103(1), Feb. 2019, pp. 251-266.

Presentation delivered by one student: E. Gareth Stanfield, M. Shareef (eds.), The Kurdish Question Revisited, Oxford UP, Oxford 2017, ch. 4.

Lesson 12: Borders, States, Nations, and Minorities in the post-colonial spaces of the MENA region

U. Makdisi, The Problem of Sectarianism in the Middle East in an Age of Western Hegemony, in N. Hashemi-D. Postel (eds.),Sectarianization, Hurst, London 2017, ch. 1.

Presentation delivered by one student: L. Kamel, Reshuffling the Middle East: a Historical and Political Perspective, «The International Spectator», 51(3), 2016, pp. 132-141.

See the Program/Programma

Note

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

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