"American Colonialism and Indigenous Histories" graduate seminar offered this fall

David Chang will teach AMST 8920-003/HIST 5910-001 American Colonialism and Indigenous Histories on Tuesdays 1:25-3:20 p.m. during Fall 2016.

Course Description:
Colonialism, American Indian Studies, and indigenous studies have been, for the past twenty years, some of the most productive sites of scholarship in the humanities, including history. They are topics of study that demand by their very nature the bringing together of different fields of endeavor, different disciplines, and different questions. This semester we will be addressing a number of current literatures and questions: settler colonialism, questions of the intersection of discursive construction and material processes of domination (especially as regards land, sovereignty over land, and land alienation), gender and sexuality, performance and demands for/discourses of authenticity, religion, belief, spirituality, and missionization, and racialization and racial construction. In a number of cases, we will be approaching these issues through memory, textuality, book studies, literary history, archaeology, art history, and museum studies. These fields are all rich with productive ideas, which should make for provocative discussion across geographies and time periods. Of particular interest will be: what do these other fields have to offer the discipline of history, and what does the discipline of history bring to these other disciplines and interdisciplinary modes of analysis?  This is a conversation that can bring us together on a common intellectual project, given the disparate graduate programs you come from as students.