231061 IAS MA Betreuungsseminar: "Globalization and the Americas" (S) (WiSe 2013/2014)

This introductory course to Inter-American Studies inevitably and critically engages with AMERICA the object of study of Americanists in the fields of American, New American, Latin American, Inter-American, Hemispheric studies, but, some may argue, not the subject matter of Americanists working in the field of American American studies! From a historical perspective, we will approach rhetorical issues or what Bell Chevigny and Gari Laguardia have called the continental “rhetorical malpractice” in the Americas and attempt to disentangle/grasp the unique and/or not so unique quality of Americanness of a territory that some have considered a volatile territory of chronic, if not, exceptional instability from the moment the hyperbolic Christopher Columbus set foot on it. Further, acknowledging, as Richard P. Appelbaum and William I Robinson remind us, that globalization is one of the “most hotly debated and contested” concepts of the twenty-first century but also an idea of great explanatory power, this course will also explore the position of the American Hemisphere, the ‘New World’ that Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein have theorized as essential to the development of capitalist world-economy, in the turbulent process of contemporary globalization. To this end students will read historical documents by among others Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, Simón Bolívar, Sagoyewatha; theoretical texts that include Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Michel-Rolph Trouillot; and will be encouraged to critically explore urgent political issues and social struggles that humanity faces in the Americas of the twentieth-first century which, in the stage of current global capitalism, can be better understood and analyzed from a global perspective

Bibliography

1. Required Reading for the Intensive Course will be made available to students on the Stud. IP

2. Required Reading for the Begleitseminar:

Students must start reading these (long) books to their earliest convenience

- Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America. London: Profile Books, 2009.

- Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Penguin, 2007.

- Robinson, William I. Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Global Perspective. Baltimore, MA: The John Hopkins UP, 2008.

- Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. New York: First Herpel Perennial Modern Classics, 2010.