Global Core Lecture Course
This lecture course comparatively and transnationally investigates twentieth-century communism as a modern civilization with a global outreach. It looks at the global spread of communism as an ideology, an everyday experience, and a form of statehood in the Soviet Union, Europe, Asia (i.e.Mao’s China), and post-colonial Africa. With the exception of North America and Australia, communist regimes were established on all continents of the world. The course will examine this historical process from the October Revolution (1917) to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986), which marked the demise of the communist state. The emphasis is not just on state-building processes or Cold War politics but primarily on the social, gender, cultural and economic policies that shaped lived experiences of communism. We will closely investigate what was particular about communism as a civilization in topics ranging from sexuality, materiality, faith, selfhood, cultural identity, collective, or class and property politics. We will explore the ways in which “ordinary people” experienced communism through violence (anti-imperial and anti-fascist warfare; forced industrialization) and as subjects of social policies (gender equality, family programs, employment, urban planning). By closely investigating visual, material and political representations of life under communism, the course demonstrates the variety of human experience outside the “West” and capitalist modernity in an era of anti-imperial politics, the Cold War, and decolonization, as well as the recent environmental crises.
Recommended textbook:
Cambridge History of Communism, Vol. I-III (CLIO on-line)[2017]
Tanya Harmer, Beatriz Allende. A Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (CLIO on-line) [2020]
List of books for the final book review essay:
Political Economy/ Global Order:
Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order
Margarita Balmaceda, Russian Energy Chains: the Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union
Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology
Howard French, China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology
Sergei Medvedev, A War Made in Russia
Culture and Politics:
Christina Morina, The Invention of Marxism
Jade McGlynn, Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia
Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands. A Personal History of Europe
Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination
Kristen Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex under Socialism: and Other Arguments for Economic Independence
WEEKLY READINGS:
