Decolonization to Globalization: How to End an Empire

3 units

The conventional markers of the twentieth century — colonialism, imperialism, decolonization, globalization — are acutely complexified when we mobilize gender and sexuality as modes of analysis. In this course we bring questions of sexual difference and gender to the history of South Asia, in particular, to the relatively young nation of Bangladesh. We “engender” the contradiction between seemingly world-historical developments and the lived experiences of billions. We probe how narratives of progress and uplift, national self-determination, the non-profit industrial complex, development aid, and the normative family have shaped and given shape to the very idea of gender. Finally, we examine the capacious power of gender to interrupt the power of the state and to reorganize extractive relations of caste and race.