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Click here for the Spring 2006 Resident Director's courses.
The Resident Director for Fall 2005 is:
Marcus Daniel
UHM History Department
Professor Daniel will be offering the two courses below. Students must take at least one of these.
History 348: Britain and the Black Atlantic (W)
Course Description
The impact of Afro-Caribbean immigration to the Untied Kingdom is one of the most important issues in post-war British history. But the presence of people of African descent in Britain is not new. By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain was the most important slave-trader in the world, and Atlantic sea-ports like Bristol were bustling centers of an enormously profitable trade in slaves and the products of slavery like tobacco and sugar. By the nineteenth century, British colonial possessions in North America and the Caribbean, dominated by large-scale plantation agriculture and the ruthless exploitation of African labor, were an integral part of the most dynamic and powerful commercial economy in the world. This course explores the history of British involvement in the growth of an Atlantic slave system, the history of anti-slavery and abolition in the British Empire, and the role of the African diaspora created by New World slavery in the evolution of British society, culture and politics. Beginning with Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking work, The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double-Consciousness, this course will explore the place of slavery in British history and the place of Britain in the emergence of a black Atlantic diaspora. Moving beyond the boundaries of the nation state, it traces the circulation of ideas and people between Britain, North America, the Caribbean and Africa, and assesses the role members of the black diaspora played in the formation of what Gilroy calls a counterculture of black modernity. A number of key figures – Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Mary Seacole, W.E.B Debois, C.L.R. James and V.S. Naipaul among others – will be used to link Britain to the wider history of the Atlantic world and provide the course with a sense of focus. By excavating the hidden history of Britain in the Black Atlantic, students will be able to understand more clearly both the cultural specificity of contemporary English debates about race, citizenship and nationhood, and the relationship of these debates (and the history of Britain itself) to the broader history of the Atlantic world.
Course Readings
Professor Daniels will select a number of relevant books and put together a course reader for students.
Course Requirements
All students will be expected to attend class regularly and to complete the assigned readings for the class. This will be especially important as much of the class will be devoted to the discussion of primary and secondary texts rather than formal lectures. Each student will be responsible for several class presentations during the semester. Students will also be expected to keep a regular class journal recording their reaction to readings and issues raised in class, as well as to materials they encounter and experiences they have outside the classroom that relate to the central theme of the course. This journal will be collected on a regular basis. All students will be required to write a substantial final essay (of at least ten pages) that relates in some way to the theme of the course, and develops this in an imaginative, solidly researched and historically grounded way.
Course Grading
Attendance and Participation = 15%
Class Presentations = 10%
Class Journal = 40%
Final Essay = 35%
History 349: England's Dreaming: Empire and the History of British National Identity (W)
Course Description
In the last twenty years British national identity has become an issue of major public importance in the United Kingdom, spawning a vast amount of cultural commentary in the press, in film, in imaginative literature and in the world of academic scholarship. Never before has it been so problematic to be British, and never before has national identity appeared to be so fragile and so fluid. The most important sources of this widespread cultural anxiety are not hard to locate: decolonization and the disintegration of the British Empire after the Second World War, the impact of large-scale south Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigration to England since the 1950’s, relative economic decline, British entry into Europe in the 1970’s, and the steady fragmentation of political authority within the United Kingdom. Tom Nairn’s book The Breakup of Britain written in the late 1970’s now seems clairvoyant and as if to mark its foresight has recently been issued in a 25th anniversary edition! This course will introduce students to the long and complex history of British national identity. Beginning with the Act of Union in 1701 the English imperial state absorbed neighboring nation states in Scotland and Ireland, and English society generated a new sense of imperial identity, as “Britons,” that was central to the creation of a global empire in Asia, Africa and Middle East during the nineteenth-century. We will explore the genesis of this cultural identity in English exploration and colonization during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its maturation in Victorian England, and the fate of British identity in a twentieth century characterized by decolonization and imperial decline. Along the way we will look closely at changing forms of imperial identity, tracing their relationship to more specifically English ideas about cultural identity, exploring their influence on English politics and culture, and examining how the empire shaped other critical forms of social identity in the nation state like those of class, gender, race and region. Hopefully this will enable students to develop a more critical perspective on the way contemporary English society understands and constructs its own imperial past, and the way this understanding informs current debates about issues like immigration and race, citizenship and national identity. Although the course will be built around a series of primary and secondary readings, it will exploit the unique opportunity provided by the London program to explore how ideas about national identity are expressed in the physical and built environment (landscape and urban architecture, heritage cities and houses), in material and visual culture, and in the popular culture of Britain.
Course Readings
Professor Daniels will select a number of relevant books and put together a course reader for students.
Course Requirements
All students will be expected to attend class regularly and to complete the assigned readings for the class. This will be especially important as much of the class will be devoted to the discussion of primary and secondary texts rather than formal lectures. Each student will be responsible for several class presentations during the semester. Students will also be expected to keep a class journal recording their reaction to readings and issues raised in class, as well as to materials they encounter and experiences they have outside the classroom that relate to the central themes of the course. This journal will be collected on a regular basis. All students will be required to write a substantial final essay (of at least ten pages) that relates in some way to the theme of British national identity, and develops this in an imaginative, solidly researched and historically grounded fashion.
Course Grading
Attendance and Participation = 15%
Class Presentations = 10%
Class Journal = 40%
Final Essay = 35%.
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