A small number of graduate seminars taught by 3CT faculty fellows and associates have been designated Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory courses. Unless otherwise noted, these seminars meet in Wilder House. They are regularly scheduled courses, and students must be registered in order to attend.

Current Courses

Spring Quarter 2008

Performance and Politics in India, William Mazzarella
Anthropology 42900

With the explosion of commercial media in India during the last twenty years, much attention has been given to the relationship between political action and mass media. This seminar considers and pushes beyond such much-debated recent instances as the alleged complicity between the televised 'Ramayana' and the rise of an violently intolerant Hindu nationalism. We will consider the potentials and entailments of various forms of mediation and performance for political action on the subcontinent, from 'classical' textual sources, through 'folk' traditions and 'progressive' dramatic practice, to contemporary skirmishes over 'obscenity' in commercial films.

Commodity Aesthetics: Critical Encounters, William Mazzarella
Anthropology 50500

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s classic writings on the relationship between cultural production, capitalism and aesthetic experience, value and embodiment are back on the anthropological agenda. Why should this be the case? What relevance does the cultural critique of the Frankfurt School hold for contemporary ethnographic projects? Although this seminar in a sense hinges on the work of Benjamin and Adorno, it is above all an attempt to locate the questions they asked in relation to a longer philosophical genealogy: broadly, German critical responses to capitalist modernity and its particular claims on the senses. Readings will include excerpts from key texts by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Lukacs, Weber, Simmel, Balasz, Kracauer, Adorno, and Benjamin.

Death, Mourning, and the Politics of Self-Sacrifice in the Middle East, Lisa Wedeen
Political Science 36800

Open to senior undergraduates and graduates by consent only. This graduate seminar explores suicide bombing, discourses of martyrdom, contestation over gravesites, practices of commemoration, and the imagery of self-sacrifice in the Middle East. Drawing on debates in political science, anthropology, and history, we shall investigate the relevance of military occupation to suicide bombing, the relationships among dying, killing, and state sovereignty, the vexed connections between obligation and consent, changing norms about violence as a mode of political struggle, and the various forms of political solidarity that notions of sacrifice exemplify. This course is theoretically oriented and historically and ethnographically grounded. In contrast to approaches that posit the politics of self-sacrifice as a "problem" in need of a solution or as a peculiarly Middle Eastern phenomenon, this course seeks to de-pathologize such practices by comparing and contrasting them to practices of violence and commemoration in other times and places. Among the authors we will read are Hannah Arendt, Talal Asad, Lara Deeb, Frantz Fanon, Engseng Ho, Thomas Laqueur, Claudio Lomnitz, Robert Pape, Roxanne Varzi, and Slavoj Zizek.

Recent Courses

Postcolonial Theory and Beyond, Dipesh Chakrabarty & Leela Gandhi
History 61801

This course intercepts postcolonial theory at an important moment in its disciplinary mutation. In recent years critics and commentators both within the field and hostile to it appear increasingly at one in their dramatization of a certain theoretical "exhaustion" with questions hitherto raised under the banner of postcolonialism. What are the reasons for this new critical ennui? What relation does it bear to earlier critiques of the field? What, if any, are the (epistemological and political) costs of giving full credence to this recent version of anti-postcolonialism? To what extent may we map a future forpostcolonial theory? In our readings and discussions we will review crucial and canonical moments in the gestation of the field (Bhabha, Spivak), canvass some recent critiques (Hardt and Negri, Badiou), and review some new directions (cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, ethics).

The 21st Century: Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, Jean & John Comaroff. A course sponsored by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. Anthropology 53701. (Limit: 25 graduate students, no auditors, preference for students from doctoral departments)

Postcolonial and post-totalitarian polities across the world appear to be caught in a pervasive paradox. On one hand, they manifest a pronounced faith in the law, in the capacity of the constitution and litigation, to produce social order amidst radical economic, political, and ideological change. Indeed, it might be argued that political processes are increasingly being displaced into the legal arena. On the other hand, postocolonial polities are haunted by a metaphysics of disorder: by the collapse of the Weberian ideal of the state in the face of apparently uncontrollable violence and unpoliceable crime and by the sheer difficulty of imagining a politics adequate to the present global moment. How might we understand the co-presence of these two things, the fetishism of the law and the metaphysics of disorder? And why has the growth of democratic institutions across the world been accompanied by a dramatic expansion of more-or-less organized, increasingly violent crime? What general theoretical issues do these questions raise for an understanding of the Twenty-first Century?

Readings in Africanist Anthropology, Jean & John Comaroff
Anthropology 53610

This seminar will focus on recent writings, and problematics, from the literature on postcolonial Africa. To be read and discussed: The Criminalization of the State in Africa (Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis, and Béatrice Hibou, eds.); Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Jean and John Comaroff, eds.); Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (James Ferguson); Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Janet Roitman); Culture Troubles: Politics and the Interpretation of Meaning (Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz); Kupilikula: Governance and the Invisible Realm in Mozambique (Harry G. West); Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (Brad Weiss, ed.); Marginal Gains: Monetary Transaction in Atlantic Africa (Jane Guyer); and When Bodies Remember: Experiences And Politics of AIDS in South Africa (Didier Fassin); with, of course, some recent journal articles as well.

Thing Theory, Bill Brown
English 47010

This course will engage some basic paradigms (phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Critical Theory, cultural anthropology) for apprehending the human engagement with the inanimate object world, foregrounding such dynamics as fetishism, the uncanny, reification, and circulation. This engagement will be mediated by literary texts (by James, Mansfield, Nabokov, and Nella Larsen, &c.) and by visual and material texts (by Claes Oldenberg, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Brian Jungen, &c.). We will also spend some time attending to the recent interest in object cultures (variously understood) and the human/nonhuman divide. Participants will write two very short papers and one long paper.

Colloquium: Marx (II) , Moishe Postone
History 64602

This course will undertake an intensive examination of Karl Marx's mature social theory. Although it will also consider the development of Marx's thoughts, the course will primarily focus on a close reading of Capital. That text will not be approached as a positive science of economics, but as an attempt to formulate a critical and reflective theory of social mediation that would be adequate to the character and dynamic of modern social life.

Advanced Seminar in Modern South Asian History, Dipesh Chakrabarty
History 82800

This course will examine recent debates around the questions of history, memory, and postmodernism. To be read: William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty; Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism; Gyan Pandey, Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India; Yasmin Saikia, Fragmented Memories: Struggling to be Tai-Ahom in India; Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and Hindu Public in Colonial India; Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri-Chaura 1922-1992; Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space; Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India; Partha Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar, Andrew Sartori (eds.), From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition; as well as some journal articles and other selected book chapters.

Modern Readings in Anthropology: Kinship and Every Day Life, Danilyn Rutherford
Anthropology 21304/42100

Once the focus of fierce debate in anthropology and social theory, in recent years the topic of kinship seems to have given way to broader concerns, such as globalization and the politics of identity. Yet the problem of kinship often resurfaces. This course provides a critical survey of debates, old and new, in the study of kinship with an eye towards exploring their relevance to research on the reproduction and erosion of sociocultural difference. Readings range from classical treatments to recent reformulations that use kinship as a lens for exploring the dynamics of history, memory, and power.

Colloquium: Marx, Moishe Postone
History 64600

This course will undertake an intensive examination of Karl Marx's mature social theory. Although it will also consider the development of Marx's thoughts, the course will primarily focus on a close reading of Capital. That text will not be approached as a positive science of economics, but as an attempt to formulate a critical and reflective theory of social mediation that would be adequate to the character and dynamic of modern social life.

History & Memory: The Politics of Experience, Dipesh Charkrabarty
History 82500

This course will be divided into three parts. It will begin by discussing what is at issue in recent debates on history, memory, and the evidence of experience. Here we will read, among others, some of the writings of Joan Scott, Pierre Nora, Jacques Le Goff, Eric Hobsbawm, Kerwin Klein, Carlo Ginzburg, Hayden White, Shahid Amin, Greg Dening, and others. In the second part we will read fragments of Walter Benjamin‚ Paul Ricoeur‚ and Frank Ankersmit, critical writings on historical experience. The course will conclude by extending the discussion of historical experience through comparing developments in the discipline of history with those in new museology and film-studies.

Historiography, William Sewell and Prasenjit Duara
History 49900

The aim of the course is to introduce the major theoretical approaches used by professional historians and locate the unique role of the historical discipline within the social sciences and humanities. Students would be expected to gain a critical understanding of different schools of history (Annales, the “new” social and cultural histories, etc.), of historic methods and approaches to studying history (oral, economic, ethnographic, etc.), and of theories and theorists relevant to historians.

Comparative Politics of the Middle East and North Africa, Lisa Wedeen
Political Science 39300

This course examines major theoretical concerns in comparative politics using cases from the Middle East. It investigates the relationships between political and economic change in the processes of state-building, economic development, and national integration. The course begins by comparing the experience of early and late developing countries, which will provide students with a broad historical overview of market formation and state-building in Europe and will cover the legacies of the Ottoman empire, European colonialism, and the Mandate period in the Middle East. The course then explores topics such as: the failure of constitutional regimes and the role of the military, class formation and inequality, the conflict between Pan-Arabism and state-centered nationalisms, the role of political parties, revolutionary and Islamicist movements, labor migration and remittances, and political and economic liberalization in the 1990s.

Interpretive Methods in the Social Sciences, Lisa Wedeen
Political Science 33300

This course is designed to provide students with an introduction to interpretive methods in the social sciences. Students will learn to “read” texts and images while also becoming familiar with contemporary thinking about interpretation, narrative, ethnography, and social construction. Among the methods we shall explore are: semiotics, hermeneutics, ordinary language theory, and discourse analysis.

Colloquium: The Present as History, Moishe Postone
History 64200 (Winter) 64300 (Spring)

This two-quarter course attempts to investigate the global historical transformations of the last third of the twentieth century. It will examine the ongoing social, economic, political, and cultural transformations of contemporary advanced industrial societies and of the global order, and of various theoretical attempts to grasp those transformations. The course will investigate attempts to conceptualize those transformations in terms of the notion of postindustrial society, the idea of a transformation of capitalism, the notion of "postmodernism," as well as with reference to theories of democracy and of nationalism. It will be as much concerned with examining the presuppositions and categories of such theoretical approaches as with the processes of change themselves, and will attempt to illuminate the complex relationship of social, political, and cultural theories to large-scale qualitative historical transformations.

Legal Anthropology, John Comaroff
Anthropology 55505