Course Description
Summary
This course takes a comparative approach to the global Enlightenment. Exploring ideas of the human and humanity developed across the world at this period, we pursue the idea that forms of difference such as race, gender, and sexuality became essential to defining “human” and “humanity.” Indeed our contemporary world grapples with this legacy. We ask: who is allowed to be fully human? What are the contours of humanity? What sorts of behaviors and ways of thinking must we learn to be fully human?
The course is divided into two units, the first on European colonialism, and the second on Persian imperialism. Juxtaposing colonialism and imperialism allows us to understand the intricacies of how power works, and how forms of difference are made. Colonialism is a form of imperialism; it mechanizes imperialism to make it work more efficiently. Our work is not to make generalizations but to pay close attention to how race, gender, and sexuality shift along axes of time and geography—and also to track when and how certain structures remain intact. In short, nineteenth-century Europe is not the same as twentieth-century Euro-America is not the same as twentieth-century Iran. And yet there is a genealogy here: each one borrows from those before, and concurrent to it.
