DESCRIPTION

A principle aim of this course is to help students to develop their own theoretical apparatus based on a bottom-up approach to their own research topics, projects and materials. This course will teach how to generate theory out of data by the use of “grounded theory.” It will also use a case-oriented and comparative approach and help to develop analytical categories for research in the humanities and human sciences. This course will have as its subject-matter certain theories of resistance developed by, for example, Giorgio Agamben, Louis Althusser, Helen Cixous, Michel Foucault, René Girard, Chantal Mouffe. We will use a comparative approach to theories of resistance as interpretative frameworks and test their assumptions and methodologies against concrete case studies of resistance movements and specific acts of resistance drawn from post-colonialist, post-socialist, post-apartheid sites.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Attendance is mandatory. Students who miss more than three meetings (except for illness or others serious matters) will not be graded. Students are expected to read assigned readings carefully and participate in discussions. Each student will sign up to present a text relevant to the theme of the readings for that week. Class presentations will be limited to 10-15 minutes. A 15 pages final paper is required. Its topic will be chosen by the student himself/herself. It can draw upon work being done in other classes but must utilize the materials of this course as well. Grading: participation - 40%; class presentation - 20%; final paper - 40%.

COURSE SCHEDULE

a list of texts below includes required and suggested readings

1. Introduction: overview of the course

2. How to build theory from the bottom-up.

•  Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis . Sage Publications Ltd, 2006.

•  Robert Dubin, Theory Building . New YorK: The Free Press, 1969 (fragments).

3. Comparative approach and case studies

•  Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory (continued)

•  Charles C. Ragin, The Comparative Method. Moving Beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987 (chapter 1: “The Distinctiveness of Comparative Social Science” and 3: “Case Oriented Comparative Methods”): 1-18; 34-52.

•  James Mahoney, “Comparative-Historical Methodology.” Annual Review of Sociology , vol. 31, 2004: 81-101.

4. Postcolonialism, postsocialism and postapartheid – comparative and case-oriented approach

•  David Chioni Moore, “ Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique”. PMLA , vol. 116, no. 1, January 2001: 111-128.

•  Zsuzsa Gille, “Is there a Global Postsocialist Condition?” Global Society , vol. 24, no. 1, 2010: 9-30.

•  Shared Chari, Katherine Verdery, „Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War”. Comparative Studies in Society and History , vol. 51, n. 1, 2009: 6–34.

•  Stephen Slemon, “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World”. World Literature Within English , vol. 30, no. 2, 1990: 30-41.

•  M. Anne Pitcher and Kelly M. Askew, “African Socialisms and Postsocialisms”. Africa, vol . 76, no. 1, 2006: 1-14.

•  Alison Rice, „Francophone Postcolonialism from Eastern Europe”. International Journal of Francophone Studies , vol. 10, no. 3, 2007: 313-328.

•  Alison Stenning, Kathrin Hörschelmann, „History, Geography and Difference in the Post-socialist World: Or, Do We Still Need Post-Socialism?” Antipode , vol. 40, no. 2, 2008: 312-335.

•  Monica Popescu, „Translations: Lenin's Statues, Post-communism, and Post-apartheid”. The Yale Journal of Criticism , vol. 16, no. 2, 2003: 406–423.

5. René Girard and structural violence

•  René Girard, Violence and the Sacred , trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore, 1977 (chapter 1: „Sacrifice” and 2: „The Sacrificial Crisis”): 1-67.

•  René Girard, “The Stereotypes of Persecution”, in his, The Scapegoat . Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986: 12-23.

•  Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research”. Journal of Peace Research , vol. 6, no. 3, 1969: 167-191.

•  Johan Galtung, “Cultural Violence”. Journal of Peace Research , vol. 27, no. 3, 1990: 291-305.

•  Chantal Mouffe, On the political. Routledge, 2005 (fragments).

6. Althusser, state apparatuses and interpellation

•  Louis Althusser, „Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, in: his, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays , trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review: 127-186.

•  Judith Butler, “'Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All'. Althusser's Subjection”, in: her, The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997: 106-131.

•  Trevor Purvis and Alan Hunt, „Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology ...”. The British Journal of Sociology , vol. 44, no. 3, September 1993: 475-499.

•  Izabela Kowalczyk, “Critical Art. Selected Issues”. Poland.pl

•  Elzbieta Oleksy, “Women's pictures and the politics of resistance in Poland”. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research , vol. 12, no. 3, 2004: 162—171.

•  Tomasz Kitlinski and Joe Lockard, „Sex Slavery and Queer Resistance in Eastern Europe”. Bad Subjects, no. 69, June 2004.

•  John Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 (“chapter 3: “Culture and Resistance. Activist Art and the Rhetoric of Commitment”, chapter 5: “Abstraction and Community. Liberating Art During the States of Emergency”).

•  Sabine Marschall, “Gestures of Compensation: Post-apartheid Monuments and Memorials”. Transformations , vol. 55, 2004: 78-95.

•  Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe . Reaktion Books, 2009 (chapter 7: “Mapping the Neo-avant-garde, c. 1970”; chapter 8: “Conceptual Art between Theory of Art and Critique of the System”: 240-340).

7. Michel Foucault's concept of resistance and the agency problem

•  Michel Foucault, „The Subject and Power,”  in: The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 , ed. by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose.  New York: New Press, 2003: 126-144.

•  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison , trans. by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995: 24-31.

•  Jeffrey T. Nealon, “Resisting Foucault”, in: his, Foucault Beyond Foucault. Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008: 94-112.

•  Barry Smart, „Foucault, Sociology, and the Problem of Human Agency”. Theory and Society , vol. 11, no. 2, March 1982: 121-141.

8. Helen Cixous, manifesto and the practice of writing as resistance

•  Hélène Cixous, „The Laugh of the Medusa”, in: Feminism: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism , ed. by Robyn R.. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997: 334-349.

•  „The Poetics of Manifesto”, in: Manifesto. A Century of Isms , ed. by Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press: xix-xxxi.

• The Medusa Reader, ed. by Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.

• Medusa & Gorgones

9. bell hooks and the victim as a strong agent

•  Chela Sandoval, “On Cultural Studies: An Apartheid of Theoretical Domains”, in: her, The Methodology of the Oppressed . London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000: 66-78.

•  bell hooks, „Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in: The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. Intellectual and Politics Conversations , ed. by Sandra Harding. New York and London: Routledge, 2004: 153-159.

•  Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized , intr. by Jean-Paul Sartre. Boston: Bacon Press, 1967 (fragments).

•  David Jefferess, Postcolonial Resistance: Culture, Liberation and Transformation . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008 (fragments).

•  Ella Shohat, “Notes on the “Post-Colonial.” Social Text , vol. 31/32, 1992: 99–113.

10. Giorgio Agamben and resistance in the state of exception

•  Giorgio Agamben, The Open. Man and Animal , trans. by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004 (chapters: &4 “Misterium disiunctionis”, &9: Anthropolgical Machine; &17: “Anthropogenesis”):13-16; 33-38; 79-80.

•  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 [“Introduction”:1-12; part III : “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern”:119-180; “Treshold”: 181-188.]

•  Giorgio Agamben, “The Muselmann,” in his, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive . New York: Zone Books, 1999: 41-86.