Courses

In this course, we’ll ask how colonial models of property and personhood shaped both the eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the world we continue to inhabit today. Drawing on critical work in Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies, we’ll examine the ways in which political and economic ideas associated with the Enlightenment helped to produce racialized and gendered subject positions that were coded as pathological and subordinate. Through readings of eighteenth-century fiction and poetry, political and philosophical treatises, and autobiographical narratives, we will explore how the notion of a “possessive individual” affected the lives of laborers, women, indigenous peoples, and enslaved Africans. In addition to our eighteenth-century texts, we’ll turn to a number of more recent “texts” (including podcasts and contemporary new media) as a way of grappling with the ongoing reality of settler colonial histories.

Throughout the class, we will look to find ways of moving beyond representations of violence and conquest. We will look for examples of personhood that emphasize porosity and interconnection, rather than domination and separateness—for examples of freedom that involve communal practices of use and dwelling, rather than individual ownership.