Dr Sumi Madhok COL.5.04A

This course is available on the MSc in African Development, MSc in Development Management, MSc in Development Studies, MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture and MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

While there are no specific requirements, it is preferred that students have a background in social science or the humanities.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the growing body of scholarship that critically interrogates contemporary gender relations at various postcolonial sites. . It provides an opportunity for students to encounter and engage with canonical works within postcolonial theory alongside those of gender, feminist and critical theory in order to examine the historical and contemporary policy and practices in relation to gender. As such, the course combines a study of the historical/textual/cultural/political and philosophical in relation to and alongside the political-economic  in order to explore  questions of development, subalternity, orientalism, neoliberalism,, globalisation,  human rights,  humanitarianism, representation, agency and globalisation. Finally, the course also points to new directions in contemporary theoretical thinking that have arisen in the wake of and in response to postcolonial scholarship  for e.g. writings on Empire and Multitude,  Cosmopolitics/Cosmopolitanism, Ethics and Transnationalism with a view to explore how these might open up new ways of conceptually capturing and imagining our present.

30 hours of combination lecture/seminar sessions in the LT.

Essay (1500 words) to be presented in a workshop.

• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. (2003) Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practising Solidarity, Duke University Press, Durham
• Bhabha, Homi, Location of Culture (1994) Routledge, London: New York
• Escobar, Arturo, (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton, N.J, Princeton University Press
• Kapoor, Ilan, (2008) The Postcolonial Politics of Development, Routledge, London: New York; Mignolo, Walter, (2000), Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J;
• Said, Edward. (1985, 1995) 'Orientalism', Penguin, Harmondsworth;;
• Spivak, Gayatri. Chakravorty (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Harvard University Press.
• Grewal, Inderpal  and Caren Kaplan ( 1994) Scattered Hegemonies
• Mbembe, Achille ‘Postcolony’, University of California Press, Berkeley.
• Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff ( 2012)  Theory From the South’, Paradigm, Boulder, London.
• Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou ( 2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Polity.
• Lughod, Lila Abu. Do Muslim Women Need Saving ( 2013) Harvard University Press.

Essay (100%, 4000 words) in the ST.