Selected Courses
Anticolonial and Postcolonial Theory
How did methods of identification first used in colonialism become routine state practices of counting and registering citizens? How do forms of surveillance, detention, and policing employed in imperial warfare return to the metropole? How do international hierarchies first defined under colonialism endure in today’s global order? This course will ask how colonial legacies and forms of colonial governance persist today. It does so by examining debates within anticolonial and postcolonial theory about the aftermath of colonialism. In particular, we will consider how postcolonial thought articulates conceptions of freedom, justice, the state, and democracy and how these challenge liberal and republican ideas. Moreover, the course considers how postcolonial and anticolonial thought have influenced the formation of other critical traditions including abolitionist thought, post-structuralism, surveillance studies, and critical border studies. In doing so, critical reflections on colonialism and empire offer new ways to think about the power of the state and capital, subjectivity, political violence, borders, and migration.
Image credit: William Kentridge, Untitled (Frantz Fanon)
Biopolitics
Discussions of contagion, transmission, immunity, incubation, resilience, and quarantine focus attention not on our role as citizens but on our existence as biological beings. These terms, integral to fields of public health and virology, now stand at the center of political discourse, framing conversations around policing, political economy, sovereignty, and democratic society. Yet, the discussion of biopolitics began long before COVID-19. Michel Foucault coined the terms to name a form of power that takes the life of a population as its object. Foucault’s formulation has had wide-ranging effects on political theory, changing the way we understand the body, racism, colonialism neoliberalism, war and violence, and the category of the human. The course returns to Foucault’s formative texts on the topic and examines the major debates that have followed in political theory in the study of bio-power and biopolitics. How did life come to be understood as the object of government, and how has this intensified the operations of power in the modern era? In addition to answering conceptual and historical questions, the course also seeks to expand our understanding of the concept by engaging with the array of topics in which biopolitics has made transformative interventions. From understanding the politics of DNA sequencing and stem cell research to analyzing the transformations of labor and global warfare, biopolitics is a concept that provides key insights into our contemporary political moment.
Machiavelli Then & Now
Accusations of “Machiavellianism” abound. The term is a forceful condemnation of a political opponent, suggesting unparalleled deceit and inevitable treachery. Despite this association, politicians and political advisers, ranging from Emmanuel Macron to Steven Bannon, still refer to their knowledge of Machiavelli as evidence of their political skill. While Machiavelli has become an integral part of our political vocabulary, we often lack a sense of what he said and how it has been interpreted. Machiavelli has been called many things: a master of statecraft, a teacher of evil, a quintessential republican, and a radical democrat. These many versions of Machiavelli often tell us as much about the thinker engaging with the work of Machiavelli as they tell us about the Renaissance Florentine himself. This course examines how Machiavelli’s ideas have influenced debates about the role of the people within a political order, ideas of morality and politics, the nature of political knowledge, and the relationship between violence and authority, among other issues. Revisiting the debates around Machiavelli’s political thought alongside the original text provides us not only with a chance to dispute earlier interpretations but also offers a map of major concepts in political theory. Drawing on the interventions of his many interpreters, we will consider how Machiavelli might speak to our contemporary political moment. How does a society contain the influence of wealth and private interest on public life? Where do love and fear arise in politics? How do we build a polity that can endure?
The City in Political Theory
Everywhere we look, cities and urban spaces are remaking the terms of politics. Currently, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and the United Nations projects that number will rise to 68% by 2050. With rapid urbanization, cities have become places of tremendous geopolitical, economic, and ecological significance. Political theory has a long history of thinking about the city from at least as early as Aristotle’s definition of the human as the animal who is a member of a polis (city). Contemporary political theory has drawn upon this tradition to theorize the politics of cities that far exceed the size and scale of the ancient polis. This course asks how returning to the political theory of the city can shed new light on ideas of community, agency, security, equality, and democracy. The course will address the following questions: How do power relations within cities differ from those that define the nation-state? What possibilities for democratic practice and egalitarian redistribution does the “right to the city” offer? How has the city’s return to prominence in politics brought with it the expansion of surveillance and the securitization of everyday life? In an era of ecological crisis, can collective action in cities “scale up” to have global effects?
Image credit: Unequal Scenes