Social Theory and Analysis

Readings

Session 1: Introductions

• No readings assigned.

Session 2: The Social Contract, Liberal Individualism, Colonial Contexts

• Collier, Jane F., Bill Maurer, and Liliana Suarez-Navaz. “Sanctioned Identities: Legal Constructions of Modern Personhood.” Identities 2, no. 1–2 (1995): 1–16.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. (Focus on pp. 257–71, 283–97.)
• Locke, John. “Chap I.,” “Chap II. Of the State of Nature,” “Chap. IV. Of Slavery,” “Chap V. Of Property,” “Chap VI: Of Paternal Power.” In “An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government,” Book II of Two Treatises of Government. Awnsham and John Churchill, 1698, pp. 165–76, 182–210. (Read surrounding material as curious).
• Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 62–68. ISBN: ‎9780801484636. 
• “Frederick Douglass, September 3, 1848, Letter. To Thomas Auld. Foner, Philip (ed). Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999, p. 111.” Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University.
• Pateman, Carole. “Contracting In,” and “Contract, the Individual and Slavery.” In The Sexual Contract. Stanford University Press, 2018. ISBN: ‎9781503608276. [Preview with Google Books]
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Pocket Books, 1967, pp. 5–26, 46–54, 68–71. 
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited with an introduction and notes by Miriam Brody.  Penguin Classics, 2004, pp. 1–57, 79–123, 175–94, 257–69. ISBN: ‎9780141441252.
• Jacobs, Harriet A. “Letter from a Fugitive Slave: Slaves Sold under Peculiar Circumstances,” New York Daily Tribune, June 21, 1853. 
• Martino-Trutor, Gina M. “‘As Potent a Prince as Any Round About Her’: Rethinking Weetamoo of the Pocasset and Native Female Leadership in Early America.” Journal of Women’s History 27, no. 3 (2015): 37–60.

Session 3: The Critique of Political Economy

• “Editorial: You Cannot Unite,” Voice of Industry, May 15, 1846. (For context, look to Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860. 2nd ed. Columbia University Press, 1993. ISBN: ‎9780231041676. [Preview with Google Books]).
• Tucker, Robert C., ed. Selections from The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. ISBN: ‎9780393090406.
  • “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” (pp. 66–93).
  • “Society and Economy in History” (pp. 136–42), “Theses on Feuerbach” (pp. 143–45), “The German Ideology, Part I” (pp. 146–75).
  • The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (pp. 594–617).
  • Selections from Capital:
    • I.1 The Two Factors of the Commodity, I.2 The Two-fold Character of the Labour Embodied in Commodities, I.3 The Form of Value or Exchange-Value, I.4 The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof, IV The General Formula for Capital, VI The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power (pp. 302–43), XV Machinery and Modern Industry (403–17), XXVI The Secret of Primitive Accumulation (pp. 431–34).
  • Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) (pp. 734–59).
• Robinson, Cedric J. “Preface to the 2000 Edition,” “Introduction,” “Racial Capitalism,” “Process and Consequences of Africa’s Transmutation: The Diminution of the Diaspora,” “The Atlantic Slave Trade and African Labor” (read especially the section “African Labor as Capital”), and “The Formation of an Intelligencia.” In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. 3rd ed. University of North Carolina Press, 2021. ISBN: ‎9781469663722. [Preview with Google Books]
• Gramsci, Antonio. “State and Civil Society.” In Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International Publishers Co., 1971, pp. 206–18, 229–76. ISBN: ‎9780717803972.
• Williams, Raymond. “Ideology” and “Hegemony.” In Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1978. ISBN: ‎9780198760610. [Preview with Google Books]
• Gibson-Graham, J. K. “Strategies.” Chapter 1 in The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ISBN: ‎9780816648054. 
• Harvey, David. “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 3 (1990): 418–34.

Session 4: Communities of Sentiment, Nations, Migrations

• Durkheim, Émile. “The Anomic Division of Labour” and “The Forced Division of Labour.” Book 3, Chapters 1–2 in The Division of Labor in Society. Palgrave MacMillan Ltd., 1984. ISBN: ‎9780333339817. 
• — — —. “Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion.” Book 1, Chapter 1 in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Free Press, 1995, pp. 21–39. ISBN: 9780029079379. 
• Hayden, Cori. “Crowding the Elements.” In Reactivating Elements: Substance, Actuality, and Practice from Chemistry to Cosmology. Edited by Dimitris Papadopoulos, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers. Duke University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781478014362. (Forthcoming).
• Mauss, Marcel. “Foreword: No Free Gifts, by Mary Douglas,” “Introduction,” “The Exchange of Gifts and the Obligation to Reciprocate (Polynesia)” (pp. 10–17), “The Extension of this System” (pp. 26–39), and “Conclusion” (pp. 83–35). In The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Routledge, 2001. ISBN: ‎9780415267489. [Preview with Google Books] 
• Hobsbawm, Eric. “ Introduction: Inventing Traditions.” Chapter 1 in The Invention of Tradition. Edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge University Press, 2012. ISBN: ‎9781107604674. [Preview with Google Books] 
• Anderson, Benedict. “Imagined Communities.” Chapter 4 in Nations and Nationalism: A Reader. Edited by Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman. Rutgers University Press, 2005. ISBN: ‎9780813536262. [Preview with Google Books]
• Chatterjee, Partha. “Whose Imagined Community?” Chapter 1 in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton University Press, 1993. ISBN: ‎9780691019437. [Preview with Google Books]
• Shire, Warsan. “Conversations about Home (at the Deportation Centre).” In Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. flipped eye publishing limited, 2011. ISBN: ‎9781905233298. (View “Warsan Shire - Conversations about Home at the Deportation Centre.” Vimeo.)
• Danewild, Ida. “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History.” Third World Quarterly 38, no. 7(2017): 1674–89.

Session 5: Bureaucracies, States, Prisons, Publics

• Weber, Max. “The Spirit of Capitalism” and “Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism.” In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge, 2001. ISBN: ‎9780415254069. [Preview with Google Books]
• — — —. “The Nature of Social Action,” “Basic Categories of Social Organization,” “Classes, Status Groups, and Parties,” “The Nature of Charismatic Domination,” and “The Development of Bureacracy and Its Relation to Law.” In Weber: Selections in Translation. Edited by W.G. Runciman. Cambridge University Press, 1998. [Preview with Google Books]
• Bowman, Scott William. “The Kids Are Alright: Making a Case for Abolition of the Juvenile Justice System.” Critical Criminology 26 (2018): 393–405.
• Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “On Covid-19, Decarceration, and Abolition.” Haymarket Books, 2020.
• Habermas, Jürgen. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964).” New German Critique 3 (1974): 49–55.
• Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.
• Warner, Michael. “Introduction,” “Public and Private,” “Publics and Counterpublics,” and “Something Queer about the Nation State.” In Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books, 2005. ISBN: ‎9781890951290. [Preview with Google Books]
• Sitrin, Marina, ed. “Horizontalidad.” In Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. AK Press, 2006. ISBN: ‎9781904859581. [Preview with Google Books]

Session 6: Culture, Anthropologically

• Stocking, George W., Jr. “Anthropology as Kulturkampf: Science and Politics in the Career of Franz Boas.” Chapter 3 in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology. University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. ISBN: ‎9780299134143. [Preview with Google Books]
• Boas, Franz. “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” and “The Methods of Ethnology.” In Race, Language, and Culture. ‎ University of Chicago Press, 1995. ISBN: ‎9780226062419. [Preview with Google Books]
• Deloria, Ella Cara. “The Reservation Picture.” In Speaking of Indians. Bison Books, 1998, pp. 75–85. ISBN: ‎9780803266148.
• Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” Chapter 11 in Structural Anthropology. Basic Books, 1974. ISBN: ‎9780465095162. [Preview with Google Books]
• Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description,” “Religion as a Cultural System,” and “Deep Play.” In The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 2017. ISBN:‎ 9780465093557. [Preview with Google Books]
• Asad, Talal. “Introduction” and “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category.” Chapter 1 in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ISBN: ‎9780801846328. [Preview with Google Books]
• Ortner, Sherry B. “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 1 (1984): 126–66.
• Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” Chapter 1 in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ISBN: ‎9780312295219. [Preview with Google Books]
• Viswesweran, Kamala. “Race and the Culture of Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 100, no. 1 (1998): 70–83.
• Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Writing against Culture.” Chapter 38 in Anthropology in Theory: Issues in Epistemology. 2nd ed. Edited by Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders. Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. ISBN: 9780470673355. [Preview with Google Books]
• Jobson, Ryan Cecil. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019.” American Anthropologist 122, no. 2 (2020): 259–71.

Session 7: Mediation: The Frankfurt School, Cultural Studies, Poststructuralisms, Social Media

• Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. “The Concept of Enlightenment” and “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Verso, 1997. ISBN: 9781859841549. [Preview with Google Books]
• Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”  In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Mariner Books, 2019. ISBN: ‎9781328470232.
• Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. “Introduction to the English Edition: David Kunzle,” “From the Child to the Noble Savage,” and “From the Noble Savage to the Third World.” In How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Pluto Press, 2020. ISBN: ‎9780745339788.
• Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’.” Chapter 29 in People’s History and Socialist Theory. Edited by Raphael Samuel. Routledge, 2018. ISBN: ‎9781138671317.
• Lipsitz, George. “Popular Culture: This Ain’t No Sideshow.” Chapter 1 in Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ISBN: ‎9780816638819. [Preview with Google Books]
• Williams, Apryl. “Black Memes Matter: #LivingWhileBlack with Becky and Karen.” Social Media + Society (October–December 2020): 1–14.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” and “Immutability and Mutability of the Sign.” Part 1, Chapters 1–2 in Course in General Linguistics. Open Court, 1998. ISBN: ‎9780231527958. [Preview with Google Books]
• Derrida, Jacques. Excerpts from “Linguistics and Grammatology.” Chapter 2 in Of Grammatology. John Hopkins University Press, 1974.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. “Introduction: Rhizome.” In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ISBN: ‎9780816614028. [Preview with Google Books]
• Moten, Fred, and Stefano Harney. “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 101–15.
• Lee, JeongHyun. “Algorithmic Uses of Cybernetic Memory: Google Photos and a Genealogy of Algorithmically Generated ‘Memory’.” Social Media + Society (October–December 2020): 1–12.

Session 8: Discourse, Biopower, Practice, Cyborgs

• Foucault, Michel. “Docile Bodies” and “Panopticism.” In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012, pp. 135–169, 195–228. [Preview with Google Books]
• — — —. “Right of Death and Power over Life.” Part 5 in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Vintage, 1990. ISBN: ‎9780679724698.
• Stoler, Ann Laura. “Placing Race in The History of Sexuality.” Chapter 2 in Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Duke University Press Books, 1995. ISBN: ‎9780822316909. [Preview with Google Books]
• TallBear, Kim. “Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family.” Chapter 5 in Making Kin Not Population: Reconceiving Generations. Edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018. ISBN: 9780996635561. 
• Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Objective Limits of Objectivism,” “Structures and the Habitus,” and “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power." In Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, 1977. ISBN: ‎9780521291644. [Preview with Google Books]
• Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Chapter 8 in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1990. ISBN: ‎9780415903875. [Preview with Google Books]
• Beck, Ulrich. “Living in the World Risk Society.” Economy and Society 35, no. 3 (2006): 329–45.

Session 9: Feminisms

• Abusharif, Rogaia Mustafa. “Narrating Feminism: The Woman Question in the Thinking of an African Radical.” differences_: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies_ 15, no. 2 (2004): 152–71.
• Jaggar, Alison M. “Feminism as Political Philosophy,” and “Political Philosophy and Human Nature.” Chapters 1 and 2 in Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1988. ISBN: ‎9780847672547. [Preview with Google Books]
• Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Penguin Classics, 2020. ISBN: ‎9780143134442.
• Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse.” boundary 2, Vol. 12/13, Vol. 12, no. 3 - Vol. 13, no. 1 (1984): 333–58.
• Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Chapter 9 in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1990. ISBN: ‎978-0415903875. [Preview with Google Books]
• Anzaldúa, Gloria E. “On the Process of Writing Borderlands/La Frontera.” In The Gloria Alzaldúa Reader. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Duke University Press, 2009, pp. 187–97. ISBN: 9780822391272. 
• Collins, Patricia Hill. “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought.” Part 1 in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment: Revised 10th Anniversary Edition. Routledge, 1999, pp. 1–44. ISBN: ‎9780415924849. [Preview with Google Books]
• Butler, Judith. “Introduction” and “Bodies that Matter.” In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993, pp. 1–16, 27–55. ISBN: 9780415903660. [Preview with Google Books]
• Koyama, Emi. “The Transfeminist Manifesto.” In Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. Edited by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier. Northeastern University Press, 2003, pp. 244–59. ISBN: ‎9781555535704. [Preview with Google Books]
• Mahmood, Saba. “The Subject of Freedom.” Chapter 1 in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton University Press, 2011. ISBN: ‎9780691149806. [Preview with Google Books]
• Cannela, Gaile S., and Kathryn D. Manuelito. “Feminisms from Unthought Locations: Indigenous Worldviews, Marginalized Feminisms, and Revisioning an Anticolonial Social Science.” Chapter 3 in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Edited by Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. SAGE Publications, Inc., 2008. ISBN: ‎9781412918039. [Preview with Google Books]

Session 10: Colonialism, Racial Formation, Postcolonialism, Decoloniality

• Fanon, Frantz. “Concerning Violence” and “Conclusion.” In The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963, pp. 35–95, 311–16. ISBN: 9780802141323.
• Galeano, Eduardo. “Introduction: 120 Million Children in the Eye of the Hurricane.” In Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press, 1997. ISBN: ‎9780853459910. [Preview with Google Books]
• Said, Edward W. “Introduction,” “Knowing the Oriental,” and “Imaginative Geography.” In Orientalism. Vintage, 1979, pp. 1–73. ISBN: ‎9780394740676. [Preview with Google Books]
• Du Bois, W. E. B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” and “Of the Dawn of Freedom.” In The Souls of Black Folk. Open Road Media, 2014. [Preview with Google Books]
• Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. “Racial Formation.” Chapter 4 in Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 2nd ed. Routledge, 1994. ISBN: ‎9780415908641. [Preview with Google Books]
• Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” (PDF - 5.6MB) Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–791.
• Gilroy, Paul. “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity.” Chapter 1 in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, 1993. ISBN: ‎9780674076068. [Preview with Google Books]
• Sumida, Stephen H. “East of California: Points of Origin in Asian American Studies.” Journal of Asian American Studies 1, no. 1 (1998): 83–100.
• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited and with an introduction by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. University of Illinois Press, 1988. ISBN: 9780252014017. [Preview with Google Books]
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 1–113, 237–55. ISBN: 9780691130019. [Preview with Google Books]
• Mignolo, Walter D. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 449–514.
• Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

Session 11: Planetary Racial and Indigenous Formation and Justice, Anthropogenic Climate Change, Global Health and Covid-19

• Mbembe, Achille. “Introduction: The Ordeal of the World,” “Exit from Democracy,” “Necropolitics,” and “Conclusion: Ethics of the Passerby.” In Necropolitics. Duke University Press Books, 2019. ISBN: ‎9781478006510. [Preview with Google Books] 
• LaDuke, Winona, with Sarah LittleRedfeather. “Standing Rock: Selma Moment for the Environmental Justice Movement.” In Being Material. Edited by Marie-Pier Boucher, Stefan Helmreich, Leila W. Kinney, Skylar Tibbits, Rebecca Uchill, and Evan Ziporyn. MIT Press, 2019. ISBN: ‎9780262043281. 
• Baucom, Ian. “Of Forces and Forcings.” Chapter 1 in History 4° Celsius: Search for a Method in the Age of the Anthropocene. Duke University Press Books, 2020. ISBN: ‎9781478008392. 
• Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” (PDF) Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–65.
• Cultural Anthropology, Covid-19 Editor’s Forum, April–May 2020. (Read any 3 of the 24 selections, all of which see cultural anthropologists seeking to document as well as explicate how Covid unfolded in the early part of the pandemic.)
• Nelson, Alondra. “Society after the Pandemic.” December 21, 2020. Society for Social Studies of Science.