First Year Seminar: Outcasts and Outlaws: The History of Othering in Modern Europe

3 units

Villainous figures such as pirates, bandits, rebels, and terrorists have easily jumped from the historical record into the broader cultural imaginary. But what, beyond their disdain for the law, do they have in common, and why do they keep resurfacing in accounts of contemporary politics? This course will survey several outsider archetypes across 19th- and 20th-century Europe and its empires. We will ask: what does it mean to be outside of the community, and which mechanisms and spaces have historically produced and maintained this exclusion? With particular attention to the history of European imperialism, this course will analyze how images of outcasts and outlaws have been shaped by perceptions of gender, race, and class, and how they have produced distinct forms of management and policing. The class will also highlight the central role that mobility has played for this type of othering. Putting archetypes from the European underworld into conversation with one another and investigating their reconfigurations across time, we will systematically work out what function they perform for past and present society and what, if any, forms of resistance they afford.