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Popular Politics and Rebellion
(G57.1030)
Spring 2004
Prof. Sinclair Thomson Course meets:
53 Washington Sq. South, 512 53 Wash. Sq. South, 607
992-9626 / st19@nyu.edu Thursday 2:00-4:45 pm
Office hours: Tuesday 2-4 pm
This class is an exploration of subaltern politics, resistance, and insurgency in Latin
America and the Caribbean from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It focuses
primarily on the experience of Indians, peasants, and slaves in a wide variety of settings,
and examines some of the leading analytical approaches to popular resistance and
rebellion. We will want to consider the value of structural materialist frameworks of
explanation, analyses of political projects, leadership, and mobilization, as well as
inquiries into insurgent political culture, ideology, and consciousness.
The first unit of the course will be conceptual and comparative, laying out three main
bodies of work which have proven especially fruitful and influential. It includes classic
texts (such as those of Hobsbawm, Genovese, and Guha) as well as subsequent critiques
of this work. Our task is to reassess the contributions and limitations of these fields in
light of contemporary research agendas for Latin American and Caribbean history. The
second unit of the course is an extended case study, an investigation of Indian, peasant,
and slave emancipation movements in the so-called Age of Revolution (c. 1770s to
1820s). Here we will want to assess the historical origins, organization, aims, and
consequences of these mobilizations, as well as assess the frameworks historians have
used to understand them. The third unit considers several problems in the study of
popular politics and rebellion: rethinking race/caste war; literary representations of
uprising; revolution and the state; and historicizing current movements. The final unit
will consist of student presentation of papers to the class for collective discussion.
Unit I: Approaches to Politics and Insurgency
Week 1 (January 22) Introduction
Review of approaches to topic, current research and critiques, program for course.
Week 2 (January 29) Peasant Studies
Reading:
Eric Hobsbawm, "Peasants and Politics,"
Journal of Peasant Studies 1 (1): 3-22, 1973.
Eric Wolf,
Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century [1969], Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1999, pp. ix-xv, 1-48, 275-302.
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James Scott, "Resistance Without Protest and Without Organization: Peasant Opposition
to the Islamic
Zakat and the Christian Tithe," Comparative Studies in Society and
History
29 (3): 417-452, 1987.
Steve Stern, "New Approaches to the Study of Peasant Rebellion and Consciousness:
Implications of the Andean Experience," in Stern, ed.,
Resistance, Rebellion, and
Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18
th to 20th Centuries
, Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1987.
Gil Joseph, "On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant
Politics,"
Latin American Research Review 25 (3): 7-53, 1990.
William Roseberry, "Beyond the Agrarian Question in Latin America," in Fred Cooper et
al.,
Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist
World System in Africa and Latin America
, Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1993.
Week 3 (February 5) Resistance and Rebellion in the African Diaspora
Reading:
Eugene Genovese,
From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the
Making of the Modern World
, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1979.
João José Reis, "‘The Revolution of the
Ganhadores’: Urban Labour, Ethnicity and the
African Strike of 1857 in Bahia, Brazil,"
Journal of Latin American Studies 29
(2): 355-393, 1997.
Robin D.G. Kelley, "‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class
Opposition in the Jim Crow South,"
Journal of American History 80 (1): 75-112,
1993.
Week 4 (February 12) Subaltern Studies
Reading:
Ranajit Guha,
Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India [1983],
Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.
Sherry Ortner, "Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal," in Terrence
McDonald, ed.,
The Historic Turn in the Social Sciences, Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1996.
Unit II: Popular Emancipation in the Age of Revolution
Week 5 (February 19) The Andes
Reading:
Sergio Serulnikov,
Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to Spanish Rule in
Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes
, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Charles Walker,
Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780-
1840
, Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, 16-54.
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Week 6 (February 26) Haiti
Reading:
C.L.R. James,
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution
(1st ed. 1938), New York: Vintage, 1989.
C.L.R. James, "Lectures on The Black Jacobins,"
Small Axe 8: 65-112, 2000.
Week 7 (March 4) Mexico
Reading:
Eric Van Young,
The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican
Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821
, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.
John Lynch, "The Colonial Roots of Latin American Indpendence," in J. Lynch,
Latin
America between Colony and Nation. Selected Essays
(London: Palgrave, 2001).
Week 8 (March 11) Spring Break
Week 9 (March 18) Guyana
Reading:
Emilia Viotti da Costa,
Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion
of 1823
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Unit III: Problems in the Study of Resistance and Rebellion
Week 10 (March 25) Rethinking Caste War
Reading:
Nelson Reed,
The Caste War of Yucatán (1st ed. 1964), Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001.
Jan Rus, "Whose Caste War?: Indians, Ladinos and the Chiapas ‘Caste War’ of 1869," in
Murdo McLeod and Robert Wasserstrom, eds.,
Spaniards and Indians in
Southeastern Mesoamerica
, 1983.
Week 11 (April 1) Imagining Caste War
Reading:
Rosario Castellanos,
The Book of Lamentations, New York: Penguin, 1998.
Week 12 (April 8) Revolution and the State
Jeff Goodwin,
No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945-1991,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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Alan Knight, "Social Revolution: A Latin American Perspective," Bulletin of Latin
American Research 9 (2): 1990.
Florencia Mallon, "Indian Communities, Political Cultures, and the State in Latin
America, 1780-1990,"
Journal of Latin American Studies 24: 35-53, 1992.
Adolfo Gilly, "Globalization, Violence, Revolutions: Nine Theses," in John Foran, ed.,
The Future of Revolutions: Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of
Globalization
, London: Zed Press, 2003.
Week 13 (April 15) Peasant and Indigenous Struggles of the Present
Reading:
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Oppressed but not Defeated: Peasant Struggles among the
Aymara and Qhechwa in Bolivia, 1900-1980
, Geneva: UNIRSD, 1987.
Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, "Insurgent Bolivia: Indian and National-Popular
Struggles, 1781-2003," ms.
Unit IV: Student Presentations
Weeks 14 (April 22) and 15 (April 29)
Requirements:
Over the course of the semester students will work on a case study of
one moment of popular mobilization, conspiracy, or revolution which they select. The
paper may be based entirely on secondary literature, or combine primary and secondary
sources. It should engage with explanations of the case offered in the secondary
literature, but go on to do original analysis into the historical dynamics of the case. I
would like to receive a statement of the paper topic and list of sources by Week 6
(February 26). A first draft will be due one week before the class meeting in which the
paper is to be discussed. Please make copies for all members of the class and leave them
off in the History Reading Room. The final draft will be due on Thursday, May 6.
Besides regular participation in class discussion, students are asked to turn in eight
comments, each approximately 1 or 1.5 pages in length, on the reading for a given week.
The comments are due by 6:00 pm on Wednesday, the day before we meet.
All books are available at the NYU Bookstore, and on reserve at Bobst Library. Articles
will be available in the file box in the History Reading Room, 7
th floor of the KJCC.
Grades will be determined based on class participation (50%) and the final paper (50%).
I do not give extensions except under dire and unforeseeable circumstances, and lateness
will affect the grade for papers.
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