Social Theory and Analysis

Additional Readings

Listed below are further readings for sessions 2–10.

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

• Stolcke, Verena. “Invaded Women: Gender, Race, and Class in the Formation of Colonial Society.” Chapter 16 in Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker. Routledge, 1993. ISBN: 9780415077781. [Preview with Google Books]
• Kandiyoti, Deniz. “Bargaining with Patriarchy.” Gender and Society 2, no. 3 (1988): 274–90. (Especially read pp. 274–75, 278–86.)
• Dworkin, Andrea. “The Promise of the Ultra-Right.” In Right-Wing Women. TarcherPerigee, 1983, pp. 13-36. ISBN: ‎9780399506710.

Session 3: The Critique of Political Economy

• Luxemburg, Rosa. “The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions (1906).” Marxist Educational Society of Detroit, 1925.
• Thorner, Daniel. “Chayanov’s Concept of Peasant Economy.” In A.V. Chayanov on the Theory of Peasant Economy. Edited by Daniel Thorner, Basile Kerblay, and R.E.F. Smith. University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. ISBN: 9780299105709. [Preview with Google Books]
• Gandhi, Mohandas K. “Machinery.” In Gandhi for the 21st Century, Vol. 15: Man V. Machine. Edited by Anand Hingorani. Bhavan’s Book University, 1998.
• Nkrumah, Kwame.  “African Socialism Revisited (1967).” (Paper read at the Africa Seminar held in Cairo at the invitation of At-Talia and Problems of Peace and Socialism.)
• Bataille, Georges. “The Meaning of General Economy” and “Laws of General Economy.” In The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption. Zone Books, 1991. ISBN: ‎9780942299113. 
• Baines, John M. “Los Siete Ensayos.” In Revolution in Peru: Mariátegui and the Myth. Published for the Latin American Studies Program by the University of Alabama Press, 1972. ISBN: ‎ 9780817347215.
• Taussig, Michael T. “The Devil and Commodity Fetishism” and “The Baptism of Money and the Secret of Capital.” In The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. University of North Carolina Press, 2010. ISBN: ‎9780807871331.
• Wolf, Eric R. “The New Laborers.” Chapter 12 in Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, 2010. ISBN: ‎9780520268180. [Preview with Google Books]
• Helmreich, Stefan. “Species of Biocapital.” Science as Culture 17, no. 4 (2008): 463–78.
• Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. (PDF - 5.3MB) Melville House Publishing, 2011. ISBN: 9781933633862.
• Davies, Carole Boyce. “A Black Left Feminist View on Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism.” November 10, 2016. Black Perspectives.
• Fernando, Christine. “Mutual Aid Networks Find Roots in Communities of Color.” AP News. January 21, 2021.

Session 4: Communities of Sentiment, Nations, Migrations

• Alatas, Syed Farid. “Ibn Khaldūn.” Chapter 1 in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists: Vol I: Classical Social Theorists. Edited by George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepinsky. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. ISBN: 9781444330786. [Preview with Google Books]
• Comte, August. A General View of Positivism. Trübner & Co., 1865, pp. 1–7, 64–81, 227–302. 
• Layne, Linda L., ed. “Introduction: The Child as Gift.” In Transformative Motherhood: On Giving and Getting in a Consumer Culture. NYU Press, 1999. ISBN: ‎9780814751558. [Preview with Google Books]
• Puar, Jasbir K. “Homonationalism as Assemblage: Viral Travels, Affective Sexualities.” (PDF - 11MB) Jindal Global Law Review 4, no. 2 (2013): 23–43.
• Helmreich, Stefan. “Wave Theory ~ Social Theory.” Public Culture 32, no. 2 (2020): 287–326.

Session 5: Bureaucracies, States, Prisons, Publics

• Arendt, Hannah. Excerpts from “Part Two: Imperialism,” and “Part Three: Totalitarianism.” In The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973, pp. 123–84, 341–88. ISBN: ‎9780156701532.
• Althusser. Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 127–86.
• Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 2020, pp. 1–8, 53–83, 87–102, 183–91, 309–57. ISBN: 9780300246759.[Preview with Google Books]
• Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization.” Current Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2001): 125–38.

Session 6: Culture, Anthropologically

• Fischer, Michael M.J. “Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems.” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 1 (2007): 1–65.

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

• McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. ‎ Routledge, 2001. ISBN: ‎9780415253970.
• Derrida, Jacques. Excerpts from “Différance.” In Margins of Philosophy. University of Chicago Press, 1982.
• Jenkins, Henry. “Out of the Closet and into the Universe: Queers and Star Trek.” Chapter 12 in Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Star Trek and Doctor Who. Edited by John Tulloch and Henry Jenkins. Routledge, 2005. ISBN: 9780415061407. [Preview with Google Books]
• Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race.” Camera Obscura (2009) 24 (1 (70)): 7–35.
• Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network. Duke University Press Books, 2015. ISBN: ‎9780822357551. [Preview with Google Books]
• Wilson, Pamela, and Michelle Stewart, eds. “Introduction: Indigeneity and Indigenous Media on the Global Stage.” In Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics. Duke University Press Books, 2008. ISBN: ‎9780822343080. [Preview with Google Books]

Session 8: Discourse, Biopower, Practice, Cyborgs

• Hacking, Ian. “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers.” (PDF) Humanities in Society 5, no. 3–4 (1982): 279–95.
• Rabinow, Paul. “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality.” In Incorporations. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter. Zone Books, 1992. ISBN: ‎9780942299298. 
• Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. (PDF) Stanford University Press, 1998. ISBN: ‎9780804732185.
• Spencer, Herbert. “Progress: Its Law and Cause.” Chapter 1 in Illustrations of Universal Progress: A Series of Discussions. D. Appleton and Company, 1864.
•  Wiener, Norbert. “Introduction” and “Information, Language, and Society.” In Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine: Reissue of the 1961 Second Edition. MIT Press, 2019. ISBN: ‎9780262537841. [Preview with Google Books]
• Weyehile, Alexander G. “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music.” Social Text 20, no. 2 (2002): 21–47.

Session 9: Feminisms

• Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I a Woman?” Anti-Slavery Bugle 6, no. 41 (1851).
• Beauvoir, Simone de. “Introduction.” In The Second Sex. 1949. Penguin, 1972.
• Irigaray, Luce. “This Sex Which Is Not One.” Chapter 2 in This Sex Which Is Not One. Cornell University Press, 1985. ISBN: ‎9780801493317. [Preview with Google Books]
• Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Chapter 16 in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. Routledge, 1993. ISBN: ‎9780415905190. [Preview with Google Books]
• Bordo, Susan R. “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought and the Seventeenth-Century Flight from the Feminine.” Chapter 6 in The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture. State University of New York Press, 1987. ISBN: ‎9780887064111. [Preview with Google Books]
• Hernández Castillo, R. Aída. “Zapatismo and the Emergence of Indigenous Feminism.” NACLA Report on the Americas, September 25, 2007.
• McRuer, Robert. “Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.” In Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York University Press, 2006. ISBN: ‎9780814757130. [Preview with Google Books]
• Hayward, Eva. “Transxenoestrogenesis.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1–2 (2014): 255–58.
• Salem, Sara. “Intersectionality and Its Discontents: Intersectionality as Traveling Theory.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 1 (2018): 403–18.

Session 10: Colonialism, Racial Formation, Postcolonialism, Decoloniality

• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “Introduction: Towards the Universal Language of Struggle” and “The Language of African Literature.” Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Heinemann, 2011, pp. 1–33. ISBN: ‎9780852555019. [Preview with Google Books] 
• Quijano, Anibal. “Modernidad, colonialidad y América Latina.” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80.
• Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. “Preface.” In Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN: ‎9780674006713. [Preview with Google Books] 
• Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. “Theory from the South.” Chapter 1 in Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. Routledge, 2011. ISBN: ‎9781594517655. [Preview with Google Books]