The course History 5690: State, Genocide, and the Twentieth-Century World, taught by visiting Professor Michael Meng, will meet Tuesdays, 3:35 P.M. - 5:30 P.M in Spring 2009.
History 5690: State, Genocide, and the Twentieth-Century World
Tuesday, 03:35 P.M. - 05:30 P.M. HHHCtr, Room 15
Visiting Professor Michael Meng
I. Course Description
The displacement, forced removal, and murder of people by a more powerful empire or state has occurred since the very beginning of recorded history; Homer’s Iliad and the Bible are full of episodes that today we might call ethnic cleansing. And yet the twentieth century witnessed the expulsion and mass murder of people on an almost unthinkable scale. One historian has aptly called it the “century of genocide.�? This graduate seminar will explore the history of this extreme violence in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. It will focus on several central questions: What is the relationship between the “modern state�? and mass violence? How do ordinary people become killers? What is the connection between nationalism, racism, and imperialism with mass violence?
The seminar will be divided into two main sections. The first will focus on a number of conceptual and theoretical issues such as perpetrator motivation, the role of the state, and the analytical relationship between nationalism, racism, imperialism, war, and genocide. The second section will focus on six case studies of genocide and extreme violence: the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915; the Nazi extermination of European Jewry from 1941-1945; the displacement, expulsion, and murder of Hindus and Muslims during the partition of India in 1947; the Cambodian genocide in 1975-1979; the mass murder of indigenous villagers in Guatemala in the early 1980s; and the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutu in Rwanda in 1994. In looking at these cases, we will explore the motivations of the perpetrators as well as the experiences of the victims, as well as pay close attention to the actions of local and international bystanders. Readings will come from scholars in a variety of disciplines and fields, so students outside of history are more than welcome to join. Indeed, my hope is that we will have discussions among people in different disciplines and different geographic fields of interest across the globe.
Please contact Prof. Meng for additional information at mengx057@umn.edu
II. Course Sources
The following books will serve as the focus of our discussions:
James Waller, Becoming Evil
Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide
Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State
Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust
Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime
Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre
Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers
There are no pre-requisites for this course. For additional information please contact mengx057@umn.edu
