Dr Sumi Madhok Pankurst House, 11.01G

This course is available on the MPhil/PhD in Gender, MSc in Development Management, MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities and MSc in Women, Peace and Security. 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 gender and developmentalism at various postcolonial sites.  It provides an opportunity for students to encounter and engage with canonical works within postcolonial theory alongside those of gender and feminist theory in order to examine the historical and contemporary policy and practices in relation to gender and development.  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 developmentalism, coloniality, subalternity, orientalism, representation, agency, neoliberalism, globalisation, human rights and humanitarianism. Finally, the course also introduces students to new directions in contemporary theoretical thinking that are either explicit critiques of postcolonial scholarship, i.e. texts such as ‘Empire’ and ‘Ethics’ or are critical engagements and even critical extensions of postcolonial thinking into new directions  e.g. Transnationalism.

15 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the MT.

In line with departmental policy, there is a reading week in week 6.

Formative essay (1500 words) to be presented in a day long 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 LT.