HIST 8940 is also offered in Spring 2024
HIST 8940 is also offered in Fall 2023
Spring 2024 | HIST 8940 Section 001: Topics in Asian History -- The Minor Histories of South Asia (65833)
- Instructor(s)
- Class Component:
- Lecture
- Credits:
- 3 Credits
- Repeat Credit Limit:
- 16 Credits
- Grading Basis:
- A-F or Audit
- Instructor Consent:
- No Special Consent Required
- Instruction Mode:
- In Person
- Class Attributes:
Topics Course
- Times and Locations:
Regular Academic Session
UMTC, West Bank
Hubert H Humphrey Center 20
- Enrollment Status:
Open (14 of 20 seats filled)
- Also Offered:
- Course Catalog Description:
- Topics not covered in regular courses.
- Class Notes:
- TOPIC: The Minor Histories of South Asia Course Description: Beginning at least with Subaltern Studies four decades ago, some of the more radical scholarship on South Asia has had a restless relation with disciplinary knowledge, and especially with the discipline of history (ironically perhaps because it was the most radical of the disciplinary formations in the subcontinent). Running through this scholarship is what can retrospectively be described as the orientation towards writing minor histories. Working primarily with the scholarship on modern South Asia, the course explores this orientation - its relation to other forms of writing history, and more broadly of experiencing time, its methods and political stakes. Minor: I draw on this term to describe a distinctive kind of democratic orientation - one that does not seek to realize itself through sovereignty, whether of the state or citizens. And that orientation necessarily leads to a restless relation with disciplinary history because the latter is constituted by the interplay between two very distinctive criteria of sovereignty - those of the historic and the historical. By the criterion of the historic, history has a causally determinable direction and flow, and only some phenomena are historic - those that "make history" or make a difference to this causality. History by this criterion is very much with us (witness the resurgence of "big history"), and likely can never quite be abandoned. By the criterion of the historical, what matters is not causality but context: every event is historical, and to treat an event as historical is to locate it in its time and place. Where the first criterion enshrines the sovereignty of history as a subject whose life the historian tracks, the second enshrines the sovereignty of the historian as a subject who exercise a power analogous to the judge. The first criterion is constitutively undemocratic in that it cannot be attentive to the ordinary and marginalized because they
- Class Description:
- Student may contact the instructor or department for information.
- Textbooks:
- https://bookstores.umn.edu/course-lookup/65833/1243
ClassInfo Links - Spring 2024 History Classes