Department of Political Science                                              Professor Richard K. Ashley Arizona State University         Office: Coor 6704, 965-1314

Spring 2005                                                                                         Th. 4-5:30, Fri. Noon-2:00

POS 662

International Organization

Line Number 68453

EDB 205

Many will find this a difficult and demanding course. It is a graduate seminar – conducted as a seminar and not intended or adaptable for undergraduate students. Only those graduate students ready to undertake a challenging reading program and regularly engage in a fairly sophisticated plane of theoretical discourse should enroll. This is simply not a course for students accustomed to the posture of a passive recipient of distilled knowledge. Your regular, thoughtful, and well-prepared participation is required. Your grade will largely be based on your contributions to the conversations of this course.

The reading list, which departs radically from previous versions of this course, is presented below. As you will soon discover, these materials are not primarily prompted by – or responsive to – the content of the journal, International Organization. By and large, they are not authored by political scientists. They are not, therefore, regulated by “the anarchy problematic” that governs and limits thought of world politics among those in the political science discipline. Thought so regulated can be encountered in any number of other courses offered by the Department, including especially proseminars in the field and courses concentrating on “political realism.” Instead, the materials we will be covering originate from disciplines so diverse as anthropology, philosophy, religion, cultural studies, and literary theory. Why these materials? Why, especially, in a course concentrating on the historical construction, organization, and possible transformation of global political life? This we will want to discuss.

Your grade in this course will be based on three components: (1) your regular participation, (2) your lead presentations of selected materials, and (3) a book review article due at the end of the term. These elements – what is expected – will be discussed at the first meeting.

Readings:

Nelson Mandela, Mustapha Tlili, and Jacques Derrida, For Nelson Mandela, New York: Seaver, 1987.

Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage: 1979.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York; Grove-Atlantic, 1963.

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, New York: Harper and Row, 1984.

Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Sankar Mutha, Enlightenment Against Empire, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Perry Anderson, Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso, 1998.

Achille, Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, University of California, 2001.

Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983.

V. Y. Madimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Achille Mbeme, “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,” Saskia Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization,” and Arjun Appadurai, “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination,” all in Public Culture, Volume 12, Number 1, Winter 2000.

Jacques Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy 1, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004.