GENOCIDE AND COLONIALISM

Catalog description

A rich new body of scholarship has made the argument that there is something specifically colonial about genocidal process, raising anew the question of the relationship between expansionism, cultural destruction, and mass murder. This course will examine colonialism and genocide from the 15th century to the present day, focusing on large-scale genocidal processes such as the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, specifically colonial genocides (the Herero in German Southwest Africa, indigenous people in the Americas and Oceania), and lesser known cases in ancient history (the Roman conquest of Carthage) and in the present-day (the Ogoni in Nigeria and the Ezidi in Iraq). Specific emphasis will be place on historical trajectories and ideological continuities that tie together many cases of modern genocide, challenging the image of genocide as a "closed" system occurring at a distinct moment in time. Students will also be asked to analyze cases of atrocity, such as the French use of torture in colonial Algeria, for their shared patterns with proximate genocidal process and what this means for our approach to early warning and prevention in the present-day.