Sophomore Seminar: Globalization and its Descendents

The metanarrative of globalization and global inter-connections privileges the story of markets, growth, and mobility. That story is relentlessly optimistic, and simultaneously, devoid of an understanding of gender, sexual difference or race. In this course, we take a different approach. We discard the more conventional "metrics" of globalization by focusing instead on another equally global story: the manner by which human beings have been gendered and racialized over time. Doing so allows us to revisit globalization through its own deceptions, its interconnected secrets. We confront a different set of questions: how has intimacy shaped global mobility, what is the relationship between caste and MAMAA, between custom and the movement of capital, between "slums" and scale, between incarceration and eurocentric histories, how does the normative family propel global racial regimes? Most crucially, how and why is the emotional and intimate story of globalization concealed? The seminar class utilizes a wide array of sources, historical documents, scholarly critiques, novels and film and largely considers the longer, global history of India as the case study. Our specific focus will be on the secretive interconnections of slavery, seclusion, settlers, servitude, surrogacy, and scholarship, as we take a deep dive into the disguises, and the more hidden aspects, of globalization
Course Attributes: BU BA; BU IS; AS HUM; AS LCD; EN H

Sophomore Seminar: Globalization and its Descendents

HISTORY 270A

Section 01