SESSION FOURTEEN: RESPONSES TO STATE POWER (31/5)

Session Fourteen will take place from 3pm on Thursday 31st May in Room 104, Senate House. The theme is ‘Responses to State Power’ and we will discuss the counterculture, the new left, the rise of social movements, separatism and terrorism.

Key texts:

• Stuart Hall, “Life and Times of the First New Left” in New Left Review, Vol.61 (2010)
• Jeremi Suri, “The Rise and Fall of an International Counterculture, 1960–1975” in The American Historical Review, Vol.114, No.1 (2009)
• J. Zeitz, “Rejecting the Center: Radical Grassroots Politics in the 1970s — Second-Wave Feminism as a Case Study” in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol.43, No.4 (2008)

Additional Texts:

• Radio Free Europe: http://www.rferl.org/section/history/133.html
• Michael J. Kramer, ‘”Can’t Forget the Motor City”: Creem Magazine, Rock Music, Detroit Identity, Mass Consumerism, and the Counterculture’ in Michigan Historical Review, Vol.28, No.2 (2002)
• Michael Allen, ‘”I Just Want to Be a Cosmic Cowboy”: Hippies, Cowboy Code, and the Culture of a Counterculture’ in The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol.36, No.3 (2005)
• Ron Eyerman, “Social Movements: Between History and Sociology” in Theory and Society, Vol.18, No.4 (1989)
• Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee, (1995)

We will also be showing the film The Baader Meinhof Complex. Please be advised that this film contains violent scenes and scenes of a sexual nature.

SESSION THIRTEEN: GLOBALIZATION (17/05)

Session Thirteen on globalization will take place on Thursday 17th May from 3pm in Room 261, Senate House. We will weave in the broad readings of globalization given below to the historical processes we have already been discussing, and think particularly about how economic and political globalization(s) have affected the postwar world, as well as asking whether these are in fact much older processes.

Key Readings:

Dani Rodrik – “Sense and Nonsense in the Globalization Debate” in Foreign Policy, No.107 (1997)

Jose Antonio Ocampo – “Globalization, Development and Democracy” http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/ocampo.pdf

Additional texts:

Joseph Stiglitz – Globalization and its Discontents and/or Making Globalization Work

Immanuel Wallerstein – “Globalization or the Age of Transition? A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World System” http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/globalization_transition.pdf

Druce Mazlish – “Globalization Nationalized” http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/globalization-nationalized.pdf

Fredric Jameson – “Globalization and Political Strategy” in New Left Review, No.4 (2000)

Joe Perkins – “Searchers, not Planners” in London Review of Books, Vol.29, No.11 (2007)

SESSION TWELVE: POSTWAR EUROPE (03/05)

Session Twelve will take place on Thursday 3rd May from 3pm in Room 103. We’ll be talking about aspects of postwar Europe including the EEC, EU etc and the social democratic model.

Key readings:

• Tony Judt, Postwar - ‘Coda: The End of Old Europe’ and Chapters 8, 10 & 11

and/or

• Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes - Chapter 9, “The Golden Years”

Additional texts:

• Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had it So Good
• G Bock, P Thane (eds.), Maternity and Gender Policies: women and the rise of the European welfare states, 1850-1950
• Arne Ruth, “Postwar Europe: The Capriciousness of Universal Values” in Daedalus, Vol. 126, No. 3
• Perry Anderson, “Depicting Europe” in London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 18 (2007)
• Adam Przeworski, “Social Democracy as a Historical Phenomenon” in New Left Review, No.I/122 (1980)
• Perry Anderson, “Under the Sign of the Interim” in London Review of Books, Vol. 18, No.1 (1996)
• Luciana Castellina, “European?” in New Left Review, No.55 (2009)
• Craig Parsons, “Showing Ideas as Causes: The Origins of the European Union”  in International Organisation, Vol.56, No.1 (2002)

 

IMPORTANT: CHANGE OF DATE

Please note that session eleven on the politics of race will now take place on 19th April from 3pm in Room 103, Senate House.

SESSION ELEVEN: THE POLITICS OF RACE (19/04)

Session Eleven will take place on Thursday 19th April from 3pm in Room 103, Senate House. We will discussing the following themes: eugenics and racial policy; racial states and apartheid; civil rights; transnational racial solidarity movements; racism and democracy.

Key texts:

• Anthony W. Marx, ‘Race-Making and the Nation-State’, in World Politics, 48 (1996), 180-208.

• Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, (1987)

Additional texts:

• James Baldwin, Not in my Name
• Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• “Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the racial century: genocides of indigenous peoples and the holocaust”, Patterns of Prejudice 36.4 (2002): 7-36.
• “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and Intellectual History”, in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire Colony Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008): 3-54.
• B Muller-Hill, Murderous Science (re: Nazi Eugenics) (1988)

Supplementary texts by topic:

Eugenics and Critical Whiteness Theory:

• D. Galton, In our own image: Eugenics and the Genetic Modification of People (London, 2001)
• N. Ignatiev, How the Irish became white (Routledge, 1995)
• G. Lipsitz, The possessive investment in whiteness: how white people profit from identity politics (Temple UP, 1998)

Race, Gender and Empire:

• Stoler, Laura Ann, ‘Making empire respectable : the politics of race and sexual morality in twentieth-century colonial cultures‘ in American Ethnologist (1989).

African American Resistance:

• Kelley, Robin D. G. “We Are Not What We Seem: Rethinking Black Working Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” The Journal of American History. 1993 80(1): 75-112
• Kelley, Robin D. G. ‘“But a Local Phase of a World Problem”: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883-1950’, The Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 1045-1077

SESSION TEN: NEOIMPERIALISM (22/03)

Session Ten will take place on Thursday 22nd March from 3pm in Room 34, Senate House. The topic is neo-imperialism and we will look at some of the following examples: the transition from French colonialism to U.S. imperialism in southeast Asia; lingering British imperialism in the Caribbean; the U.S. in Central America; the USSR in Eastern Europe and Afghanistan; China in Africa; USA in Middle East and Asia.

Key Text:

• G. Grandin, Empire’s Workshop

Additional Texts:

• Documentary, Indochine: A People’s War in Colour, begins here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rlktc-KdHv0
• G. Arrighi, “Hegemony Unravelling” pts 1&2 in New Left Review 32 and 33 (2005)
• Liang Zheng, “Neocolonialism: Ideology or Just Business? China’s Perception of Africa” here: http://gmc.sagepub.com/content/6/3/271.full.pdf+html
• T. Ali, “Andropov was Right” in London Review of Books, Vol.33, No.12 (2011)
• Martin Luther King on Vietnam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U

Supplementary Texts:

• G. Horne, Cold War in a Hot Zone [esp. coup against Cheddi Jagan in B. Guiana]
• W. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Life [Review here, with link to first chapter at top: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/10/15/reviews/001015.15fitzget.html ]

SESSION NINE: DECOLONISATION (08/03)

Session Nine, on decolonisation (with particular reference to the British empire), will take place from 3pm on Thursday 8th March in Senate House room 104.

Suggested texts:

• J. Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: the Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (Macmillan,1988)

• C. Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (Pimlico, 2005)

• Harold Macmillan’s Winds of Change speech: http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-topics.info/famous-speeches/harold-macmillan-speech-wind-of-change.htm
• An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory: http://www19.homepage.villanova.edu/silvia.nagyzekmi/teoria/childs%20postcolonial.pdf

  Additional resources:

  Anthony Greene article on Decolonisation in Africa (1992): http://www.historytoday.com/anthony-greene/decolonisation-british-africa

  Six part BBC special on partition begins here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF7Akfgn0e0

Session Eight: China’s Century (23/02)

Session Eight entitled ‘China’s Century’ will take place from 3pm on Thursday 23rd February in Room 103. We will discuss – in very broad terms of course! – the course of China’s century, taking in the following topics/periods: Nationalist Government and Civil War; the Communist Revolution; After Mao; and After Deng.

Key texts:

• Gang Zhao, “Reinventing China: Imperial Qing Ideology and the Rise of Modern Chinese National Identity in the Early Twentieth Century” in Modern China, Vol.32, No.1 (2006)
• David Priestland, The Red Flag (Grove, 2009), Chapter 6: ‘The East is Red’
• Perry Anderson, ”Two Revolutions” in New Left Review, Vol.61 (2010) – unpicking the Chinese and Russian Revolutions

Supplementary texts:

• Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China, (London, 1999)
• Joseph W. Esherick, “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution” in Modern China, Vol.21, No.1 (1995)
• Cormac O’Grada, ‘The Ripple that Drowns? Twentieth-Century Famines in China and India as Economic History’, Economic History Review, 61, (August Supplement, 2008), 5-37
• Sang Ye, China Candid: The People on the People’s Republic (University of California Press, 2006) – oral history which is, indeed, quite candid
• Han Suyin, Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China (Pimlico, 1994) – biography of Mao’s rather more sympathetic right-hand man, with a lot of historical context

After the session we will watch a film, title tbc but hopefully Zhang Yimou’s To Live.

Session Seven: World War II and the Postwar Order (09/02)

Session seven of The Global Century will take place on Thursday 9th February at 3pm in SENATE HOUSE ROOM 102. The topic for this session is ”World War II and the Postwar Order”. The two main foci of this session will be the new social and economic order (Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, rebuilding infrastructure) and the mass movement of populations, with questions of migration, exile and diaspora.

Key texts:

• Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, (London, 2005) – Chapter 1 “The Legacy of War” & Chapter 4 “The Impossible Settlement”
• Donna Krolik Hollenberg, “At the Western Development Museum: Ethnic Identity and the Memory of the Holocaust in the Jewish Community of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan” in Oral History Review (2000) 27 (2)

Additional texts:

• Daniela Koleva, ”Daughters’ Stories: Family Memory and Generational Amnesia” in Oral History Review (2009) 36(2)
• Greg Behrman, The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time when America Helped Save Europe, (New York, 2007)
• Mark Mazower (ed.), After the war was over: reconstructing the family, nation and state in Greece, 1943-1960, (Oxford, 2000)- particularly chapters 5 and 7

Session Six: Responses to the Great Depression (26/01)

The sixth session will take place on 26th January 2012 from 3pm in SENATE HOUSE ROOM 104, when we will consider various responses to the Great Depression including fascism, populism, Popular Frontism and corporatism in Europe, Latin America and the United States.

After this session we will show the film “Land and Freedom”.

Some possible discussion questions: What explanatory variables can account for the difference in responses to the Great Depression? Did the New Deal constitute a democratic response, or did it share characteristics with the more authoritarian examples? Why did Spain’s democracy collapse? Was the rise of Nazism inevitable under the circumstances in Germany?

Key Texts:

• S Terkel, Hard Times (pp 247-281 – ‘Concerning the New Deal’) – social/oral history
• Review of J Casanova, The Spanish Republic and Civil War (by R Fraser) http://newleftreview.org/?view=2880

Supplementary Texts:

• E Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (Chapter 4 – ‘The Fall of Liberalism’)
• H James, The German Slump: Politics and Economics, 1924-1936, (Oxford, 1988)
• P Preston, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge (Chapter 5)
• M Seidman, Republic of Egos (Conclusion)
• R L Clinton, “APRA: An Appraisal” in Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1970) [- dated style, perhaps, but good broad example of Latin American (Peru) reaction to depression]