New World Encounter, Imperialism & Technology
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
For better or worse, our contemporary world – its patchwork boundaries, its addiction-based economies, its complex geopolitics, its international languages, its multiethnic distributions, and its cultural wars – is the offspring of millennia of interracial and cross-cultural encounters, exchanges, conflicts, conquests, and colonisation. The dream of reaching the Orient, or more precisely the East Indies, spurred droves of daring explorers, merchants, and malcontents to set sail for uncharted waters and imagined shores in the fifteenth century. Indeed, the brave new world loomed large in the European imagination, but most importantly, so did its promised riches and freedoms. Colonialism, exploitation of indigenous lands and peoples, addiction-based and luxury-based consumerism, slavery, technological domination, and imperialism would dictate the direction of human history for the next five hundred years. In this five-week course, we will examine a number of themes, motifs, prejudices, tensions, and anxieties that have developed from and formed the mainstay of historic “new world narratives.” Apart from improving critical comprehension skills, we will also endeavour to cultivate reflexive thinking for analytical writing and group debate.
READING TEXTS BY ORDER OF COVERAGE:
Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Cannibals,” trans. John Florio (New York Review Book).
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Daniel Fischlin (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. with intro. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford University Press, 1996).
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (Penguin Books, 2013).
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Dover Publications, 2007).
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, intro. Margaret Atwood (Vintage Canada, 2007).