Honors Credit

Conflict and Justice in History: Imperialism and Colonialism

Dr. Louis Fenech, 8:00-8:50am MWF

Fulfills UNIFI Responsibility or UNIFI Connect Elective

Course Description: At its most basic imperialism is the naked exercise of the power of one group over another without consent, to the point of extending dominion and sovereignty over the less-empowered group.  It was both an economic arrangement and a system of rule (explicit and implicit) which evolved over time and operated differently in separate parts of the world.  Colonialism is the occupation of an area with settlers and ruling it fully or partially also without the consent of those already residing there.  This course will excavate the links and discourses engendered by imperialism, and situate them within their historical context, elaborating at the same time upon the economic climates these created, the type of historicism to which these gave rise, and to the strategies these employ(ed) in the construction of particular historiographies and nationalisms.

It is incumbent on us to note that we will engage a number of relevant thinkers and philosophers who have turned their insights toward justifying, condemning, and/or theorizing imperialism.  The early sixteenth century onwards was a time when many European philosophers and thinkers and statesmen began to deliberate more vigorously upon the ‘nature of man,’ that is to say, conceptions of what it means to be human.  The human they always here had in mind was exclusively white and European, men and (rarely) women like them.  Not coincidentally this was the same period during which the West as a construct came into being and the time when white European men were in the process of securing capital, searching for raw materials, and establishing markets in relatively new areas of the world.  In the pursuit of these ends these same thinkers created racial taxonomies and hierarchies, a graded humanity, at the top of the latter of which they and their civilizations were perched.  These were mechanisms by which to expand and justify their control and domination over the brown and black non-European bodies who resided in these fields.  These pseudo-scientific sleights of hand, eventually coupled with the banality of an overwhelming bureaucratic and administrative infrastructure, attempted to substantiate the trauma of imperialism, a distress which, to dramatically different degrees, was felt by all participants.  This blatant European ethnocentrism (to put it somewhat mildly) was put into effect in the colonization of the Americas, the conquests of India and Africa, and that of Haiti to name a small number of such regions.  This, in turn, saw the ultimate transformation of the European ethnocentrism of the late Renaissance period into scientific racism.  This last intellectual maneuver provided the ideological rationalization for both the global slave trade and slavery.

Professor Biography: Lou Fenech likes India, Indians, and Indian cultures.  He also really likes Indian food, a lot, especially Punjabi food.  At heart Lou is a Sikhologist, a guy who studies the Sikhs and Sikh traditions and has written more than a couple of books on these amazing people (check him out on Amazon).  Lou also likes to spend his summers in Southeast Asia and East Asia where he enjoys tracing the movement of Sikh communities to these countries that adjoin India.  Luckily, he also really loves the food here, particularly sidewalk food.  No surprise here as so much of this food originates in India.  Lou lectures and shows images and tells stories and shares cooking tips.