Syllabus: Making the Global South (2023)

Zarina Hashmi, "Rohingyas: Floating on the Dark Sea," 2015.

The syllabus below is for a new upper-division undergraduate course that I begin teaching this week. The topic is obviously quite broad, and I don't pretend to be comprehensive. The logic of the course is explained below. Readings are mostly linked if you wish to do the readings yourself.


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W. E. B. Du Bois, The Georgia Negro: A Social Study (1900) 


Through the study of texts, films, and images this course considers the making of the global south in two ways. First, how the global south was made from above. That is to say, the history of those conditions and patterns of thought that made the global south distinct from the north. This first task necessarily requires attention to the material and rhetorical production of the global south’s  antecedents: darker and lesser peoples, the uncivilized world, the orient, the jungle, the third world, the developing world, and so on. We will read primary sources by imperial thinkers and works of history,  political economy, anthropology and geography in order to think through the production of the global south. Secondly, this class will consider how the global south was made from below. How were these conditions of inequality and exploitation resisted? How were categories of inferiority rethought, how did the third world become a significant geography that animated social movements, political theory, and poetry?


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Week 1. Intro: The Global South from Above and Below (January 12)


Part 1. Making the World South 


Week 2. An Unequal Geography (January 19)

  1. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), 75-91. [PDF]  

  2. Janet Abu-Lughod, “Discontinuities and Persistence:  One  World  System or a Succession  of Systems?” (1993). 278-291. [PDF]

  3. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El NiƱo Famines and the Making of the Third World (2000), 279-310. [PDF]


Week 3. Capital and Labor (January 26) 

  1. Andrew Liu, Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (2020), 45-80. [PDF] 

  2. Zach Sell, Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital (2021), 87-116. [PDF]


Week 4. History and Empire (February 2) 

  1. Uma Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past,” (1989), 27-87. [PDF]

  2. Satish Chandra, "A Note On the Decentring of History and Apprehension By All People of Their History," (1972), 92-109. [PDF]


Week 5 Race and Science (February 9) 

  1. Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011), 185-220. [PDF]

  1. Edward Said, “The Intellectual Origins of Imperialism and Zionism,” (1977), 47-52. [PDF]


From David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (1995)

Part 2: Rebellion and Movement


Week 6 The Haitian Revolution (February 16) 

  1. CLR James, The Black Jacobins (1938), 3-26; 85-117. [PDF] 


Week 7 Prisoners and Rebels (March 2) 

  1. Christina Heatherton, Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution (2022), 21-46. [PDF]

  2. Anand Yang, Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (2021) 11-48. [PDF]


Week 8 Pan-Asianism/Pan-Africanism and Empire (March 9) 

  1. Selections from the African Times and Orient Review [Library of Congress]


Young India (January 1919).


Part 3: Remaking the World South 


Week 9 Nationalist Collaboration (March 16) 

  1. Selections from the Proceedings of the All Asian Women's Conference, Lahore (1931). [PDF]

  2. Madhavi Thampi, “Indian Political Activism in Republican China,” (2021), 329-349. [PDF]


Week 10 An International? (March 23) 

  1. V.I. Lenin, “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions” (1920) [Marxists Internet Archive] 

  2. M.N. Roy, “Supplementary Theses On The National And Colonial Question” (1920) [Marxists Internet Archive] 

  3. George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (1956), 289-332;363-379. [PDF] 


Week 11 Afro-Asia (March 30) 

  1. Selections from Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung (1955) 

  2. Samera Esmier, “Bandung: Reflections on the Sea, the World, and Colonialism” (2017), 81-94. [PDF]  


Week 12 The Third World (April 6) 

  1. Selections from Irwin Silber, ed., Voices of National Liberation (1970) [Internet Archive (non-Marxist)]

  2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), 148-205. [PDF]