Gender, Race, and Imperial War

This course examines the role of race and gender in imperial wars beginning in the mid-19th century. Rather than a comprehensive overview of imperialism and empire, the course focuses on specific wars that illustrate the value and utility of race and gender to particular tactics prominently used in maintaining empire, including but not limited to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, counterrevolution, and imperial policing. We will read scholarly literature, memoirs, and prose that fit within a postcolonial framework of “writing back,” offering alternative accounts of both well- and lesser-known conflicts from the perspective of the subjects of imperialism and through the analytics of race and gender.

The course is intended to be an advanced course meant to stimulate intellectual and theoretical curiosities in how to think differently about war. Rather than a lecture-format, the course should be discussion-based with all students participating in the days’ conversation. The course is not meant foster debates about the wars, necessarily, but to ask critical questions about what role race and gender play in the enactment and memorialization of imperial war. Possible wars that will be discussed include, but are not limited to: the Battle of Little Bighorn (1864); the Spanish American War (1898); the Boer War (1899-1902); Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905); Nazi Germany’s invasion and occupation of Poland (1939); the Jewish insurgency in mandatory Palestine (1944-1948); the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960); the Mau Mau uprising (1952-1960); the Algerian War (1954-1962); the Vietnam War (1955-1975); the Falkland Islands War (1982); and the U.S. led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (2001-2021). Ultimately, this course is intended to interrogate concepts such as imperialism, empire, and decolonization, and what counts as an imperial war? And, how do empires end and how do they live on?