The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and the Politics of Writing

Harvard FAS

This is an intermediate level course (100 level for both undergraduate and graduate students) that seeks to delineate the multivalence of Chinese violence across the modern century and inquire into its ethical and political consequences. Taking into account the campaigns of violence and brutality that have rocked generations of Chinese―often in the name of enlightenment, rationality, and utopian plenitude―this course places its arguments along two related axes: history and representation,…