caps-news: New South Asia History courses

[Lori O'Hollaren]

Please announce these new courses to relevant lists:


HIST 410/ HIST 510: Cultures of Political Protest in Modern South Asia (4 creds)

Mon/Wed. 2:00p-3:20p, Lillis 175
Prof. Arafaat A. Valiani         
Email: valiani at uoregon.edu
Link to syllabus: http://history.uoregon.edu/courses/syllabus/Valiani410CP.pdf 

Twentieth century India was the center of popular movements that were not only significant in the region but also had connections to forms of popular resistance in the United States, parts of Asia and Europe. In addition to Mohandas Gandhi’s celebrated non-violent movement, this period was marked by various revolutionary, anticolonial and nationalist movements that embraced political violence in novel manners. Taking the emergence of popular and non-violent movements, such as the Occupy Movement, the Arab Spring and the India Against Corruption agitation, as a provocation to study popular resistance, this course will explore the cultures, tactics and effects of popular protest in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. While tracing the histories of popular movements in South Asia we will also compare them to popular movements outside the region in cases when the movements shared a connection. Course participants will gain an understanding of the manner in which discourses of popular movements in South Asia produced cultural visions and practices of activism and social transformation. Among other things, we will trace how these movements and their leaders envisioned the role of political activists, the tactics of popular resistance and mobilization, and the significance of performative rituals during mass protest. We will reflect on the meanings of ‘political community’, resistance and agency, freedom, caste and alterity, religion, class, sexuality and gender, and political violence that were at the heart of the discourses and practices of political resistance in South Asia. Included in our examination will be religious reform movements, revolutionary nationalism (i.e. “terrorist societies”) in India, connections between Indian, Japanese and European revolutionaries, peasant insurgency, the non-violent movement led by Mohandas Gandhi, ideas of non-violent resistance and its relationship to the civil rights movement in the United States, the Dalit/ex-Untouchable movement, connections between the Black Panther Movement and the Dalit (ex-Untouchables) Panthers in India, Hindu nationalism in India, the Pakistan Movement, and the civil war in postcolonial Sri Lanka. Course materials include primary sources, secondary source readings, novels and personal accounts, and films.



HIST 386: INDIA (4 creds.)
Mon/Wed 10:00a-11:20a, Ans 195
Prof. Arafaat A. Valiani         
Email: valiani at uoregon.edu
Link to syllabus: http://history.uoregon.edu/courses/syllabus/Valiani386.pdf 

The Indian subcontinent has been thrust into the public imagination recently because of significant events on the world stage. These include the prospect of India becoming a technological and economic superpower, the fact that perpetrators of the tragic violence of September 11 2001 had a link to Pakistan and the violent end to the civil war in Sri Lanka. To contextualize these political, economic and cultural transformations this course will survey the history of the Indian subcontinent as both a colony of Britain and then as a cluster of independent countries in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will focus on the intersection between power, culture and capital in the history of the region by exploring three broad areas of study: Power and Resistance; Media, Markets and Technology; and Culture and Everyday Life. Some questions to which we will seek answers ask: How did a distinctive form of popular politics that combines militant mass protest and cultural rituals emerge in urban centers of the region in the 20th century? Was Mohandas Gandhi’s conception of the ashram revolutionary and how was this ideal space supposed to operate? How have television, film and related media been a conduit to circulate ideas about gender, sexuality and nationalism? How do food, British imperialism and understandings of ‘community’ intersect? Our materials will include an array of primary and secondary sources, novels and film, maps and architectural outlines.



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