History

The course examines the political, economic, and social history of China from the Boxer Rebellion to the contemporary era. Main topics covered include overthrow of the Qing Dynasty, the May Fourth Movement, the rise of Communism, and Reforms since the 1978-era.

Starting from recent debates and problems like new nationalism, misogyny, political homophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism the course offers a historical inquiry into the construction and development of cultural differences marked through categories like gender, sexuality, class, race, and religion from the eighteenth century until the Holocaust. Through historical case studies, philosophy, and literature it looks at the way in which Western identity-discourse and its colonial subcode have formed dichotomies like self and other, black and white, the Orient and the West, male and female, worker and bourgeois, hetero- and homosexual, and how these differences became social inequalities. The course introduces gender as a category of historical analysis. Through a critical inquiry it reconstructs the paradoxes of a “dialectic of Enlightenment” (Adorno), that means the dark side behind its claim for reason, equality, brotherhood and freedom. The course traces and illustrates the ways in which the Enlightenment has provided a rationale to mark gendered, classed and racialized boundaries in science which, more often than not, resulted in inequalities. These inequalities became embedded in European society in such a way that the active, dominant subject came to be seen as white, male, and middle class. This discourse of dominance helped to carry out European colonialism and the imperial project. With the help of a literary analysis (Joseph Conrad HEART OF DARKNESS), the course introduces into the (critical) role literature can play within the dynamics of social change and cultural discourse. Furthermore, the course introduces into critical theories, like discourse analysis and the history of knowledge, postcolonial and gender/sexuality studies and studies on Orientalism. Thus, it examines the dynamic processes of the “history of sexualities”, their formation and contradictions, which emerged out of these processes. It reconstructs how masculinity and the image of man became a central trope of nationalism and colonialism. Last but not least, it asks how colonial and anti-Semitic discourse, stereotypes of the external Other (in the colonies) and stereotypes of an internal European Other (the Jews etc.) were intertwined and how we can better understand the Holocaust from a historical, multidirectional perspective.

This course examines thematically-organized topics, exploring global aspects of the human experience across time.

This course examines the historical background of the different migrant communities which have made up New Zealand society and their relationships with each other. It covers the different experiences and perspectives of iwi, English, Scots, Welsh and Irish migrants and those from Europe and Asia arriving before the 1980s, and of new migrants since that time.

The course explores the global history of three themes - goods, peoples, and ideas. Students interrogate the new forms of power which sought to reshape global connections in the period from c. 1450 and explore the ways in which polities and societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America engaged with and resisted the rise of European power and produced alternative imagined geographies, leading to the creation both of new connections and new forms of disconnection. The course also provides an opportunity to reflect critically on the writing of global history and to consider how to best make sense of the intersections of the local and the global in this period.