Epistemology, Power, Archives

Catalog description

This course is a methods and historiography reading seminar led by faculty specializing in the history of South Asia, Middle East, and Africa. The course aims to familiarize students with historical methods, source-criticism, archival practices, and epistemic genealogies of socio-cultural conventions about the past rooted in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The emphasis on power and epistemology in archives explores questions about historical ethnographies in pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts, critical approaches to reading/hearing/sighting historical traces, working with oral sources, readings of texts in African and Asian languages, embodied historical practices, and unpacking colonial recording conventions.