Current State: Published

Course Requirements: class presentations + 1 written assignment

SESSION 1: Introduction

Giorgio Agamben, 'What is the Contemporary?', from What is Apparatus and Other Essays, Stanford University Press, 2009

Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Blackwell Publishing, 2005 (selections) 

Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Columbia University Press, 2000 (pp. 27-56)

SESSION 2: Appearance and recognition

Thomas L. Popejoy, Fingerprints and Blankness: "Personal Identification" and Proof of Appearance in Modern Sovereign Power and Political Thought, Doctoral Dissertation, John Hopkins University, 2001

Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition, Princeton University Press, 2003 (pp. 26-55)

Ranabir Samaddar, Emergence of the Political Subject, Sage Publications, 2010 (selections)

SESSION 3: Biopower/Biopolitics

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Pantheon Books, New York, 1978 (pp. 133-155)

Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, University of Chicago Press, 1991

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, 1995 (pp. 45-68)

SESSION 4: Between the ineffable and the intelligible

Instructor: Milind Wakankar

Plato, 'Phaedo', Trans. G. M. A. Grube, from John M. Cooper (ed.), Plato: Complete Works, Hackett Publishing Company, 1997

SESSION 5: 

Michel Foucault, 'The Subject and Power', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), pp. 777-795 

From: Paul Rabinow, ed., Michel Foucault: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 1: Ethics, Penguin Books, 1994

Subjectivity and Truth, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, The Ethics of the Concern of the Self as Practice of Freedom

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WORKSHOP WITH RADHIKA SINGHA AND NISHANT SHAH - October 4 + 6

In this two day workshop, we will look at specific political (colonial and contemporary) practices of identification and verification, focusing specifically on questions of territoriality, identity and technology. We will examine the notion of a person capable of unique appearance and the extent to which the shifting lines between human/non-human bring this notion into crisis.

October 4

Morning Session - Discussion of Radhika Singha's Work

Radhika Singha, 'Settle, Mobilize, Verify: Identification Practices in Early Colonial India', Studies in History 16 (2000), pp. 151-98

Radhika Singha, 'Passport, Ticket and India-rubber Stamp: The Problem of the Pauper Pilgrim in Colonial India c. 1882-1925', in H. Fischer-Tine and A. Tambe (eds), Spaces of Disorder: The Limits of British Colonial Control in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, Routledge, 2009

 

Afternoon Session - Colonial Census, Land and Identity

Student Session:

Bernard Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’ from An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, Oxford University Press, 2000 (pp 224-254) - Discussant:

Arjun Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in Carol Breckenbrige and Peter van der Veer, Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993 (pp. 314-339) - Discussant: Sambit Basu

Jaya Nandita Kasibhatla, Constituting the Exception: Law, Literature and the State of Emergency in Postcolonial India, Doctoral Dissertation, Duke University, 2005 (pp. 10-52) - Discussant:

 October 6

Morning Session - Human/Person

Student Session:

Alain Pottage, ‘Introduction: The Fabrication of Persons and Things’, from Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (eds.), Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social, Cambridge University Press, 2004 - Discussant:

Paul Rabinow, ‘Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality’, from Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, Princeton University Press, 1996 - Discussant:

Bruce Braun, ‘Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life’, from Cultural Geographies 2007 14:6-28 - Discussant:

Afternoon Session -  The Techno-Social Subject

[Discussant: Nishant Shah, Readings to be announced]

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SESSION 6:

[Readings to be announced]

SESSION 7:

[Readings to be announced]