English 351:366 / Anthro 070:401 / Rutgers College Honors Course
Migration in Literature and Ethnography
Sareeta B. Amrute

Overview. Borderlands, transnational movements, exile, hybridity, enumerating populations, racism, exclusion, and asylum are at the center of sustained investigation in the social sciences and literature.  Using a combination of ethnography, history, and fiction, we will explore the significance of population movements to economic formations, group identity, and language development, and well as embodiment, suffering, and emotion.  Through readings that focus our attention away from the United States, we will try to situate current U.S. immigration debates within the wider geographical context of neo-liberal capital regimes and within the longer historical context of human contact, travel and exchange.  We will explore the trope of displacement in fiction and how metaphors of travel and exile inform ethnography. 

Participants in this class should come prepared with a basic knowledge of social science and critical theory and a willingness to engage with challenging texts closely.

Requirements. Requirements of the class are: attendance, doing the readings, and participation.  Each student is required to write a 1-page response paper for each week’s readings, and one 4-page response paper once during the term.  There will be a take-home final exam.  

Grade Breakdown:

                                          Participation and Attendance:          30%

                                          1-page papers:                                 15%

                                          4-page paper:                                    25%

                                          Final paper:                                       30%

Topics and Readings.

Week 1:              Introduction: Themes in an Anthropology of Movement

Recommended:

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the

              Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Week 2:              Migration and Empires I: Trade and Settlement along Sea-routes

Abu-Lughod, Janet L., 1989.  Before European Hegemony: the World System

               A.D. 1250-1350. New York: Oxford U. Press. (selections)

Gogte, Vishwas D., 2000. “Indo-Arabian Maritime Contacts During the Bronze

               Age: Scientific Study of pottery from Ras al-Junays, Oman”, Adumatu,

               no.2 (July).            

Recommended:

Hall, Richard S. 1998. Empires of the Monsoon. New York: Harper Collins.             

Chaudhri, K.N. 1985. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: an Economic

              History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press.

Week 3:              Conquest, Business, and Crusades

Todorov, Tzvetan, 1983. The Conquest of America: the Question of the Other.

               New York: Harper and Row.

Recommended:

Thomas, Hugh, 1993. Conquest. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Week 4:               Settler Colonialisms

Malouf, David, 1993. Remembering Babylon.

Povinelli, Elizabeth, 1999. “Settler Modernity and the Quest for Indigenous

               Traditions” Public Culture 11:19-47.

_____. 2003. “The Poetics of Ghosts: Social Reproduction in the Archive of the

               Nation” in The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterity and Australian

               Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke.

Week 5:              New Nations, New Displacements I

Singh, Kushwant, 1988 [1956]. Train to Pakistan. London: Sangam.

Butalia, Urvashi, 2000 [1970]. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the

               Partition of India. Durham: Duke.

Recommended:

Abu El-Haj, Nadia, 2001. Facts on the Ground: Archeological Practice and

               Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of

               Chicago Press.             

Anderson, Benedict, 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.  

Week 6:              Film: Winterbottom, In this World

Week 7:              Midterm

Week 8:              Transnationalism Theorized

Castels, Stephen and Miller, Mark, 2003. Age of Migration. New York: Guilford.

Week 9:               Migration and Empires II: Displacement and Refugees

Malkki, Liisa, 1995. Purity and Exile. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press.

Weeks 10 and 11:              Migration and Empires III: the Raj Re-emerges                           

Malkani, Gautam, 2006. Londonstani. London: Forth Estate.

Phillips, Melanie, 2006. Londonistan. San Francisco: Encounter.

Recommended:

Bhabha, Homi, 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1983. The Empire Strikes Back: Race

               and Racism in 70s Britain.  London: Hutchinson.

Week 12:              Borderlands I

Salzinger, Leslie, 2003. Genders in Production. Berkeley: U. of California Press.     

Week 13:              Borderlands II

Anzaldua, Gloria, 1987. Borderlands: the New Mestiza=La Frontera.

              San Fransisco: Aunt Lute.

Saldivar, Jose David, 2006. “Border Thinking, Minoritized Studies, and Realist

              Interpretation: the Coloniality of Power from Gloria Anzaldua to Arundhati

              Roy” in Identity Politics Reconsidered. Linda Martin Alcoff, ed. New York:

               Palgrave.

Week 14:              Contemporary Labor Regimes: when objects move people

Aneesh, A, 2006. Virtual Migration: the Programming of Globalization. Durham:

               Duke.

Kunzru, Hari, 2004. Transmission. London: Plume.

Recommended:

Ong, Aihwa, Flexible Citizenship.

Week 15:                Security, Politics, Borders

This week we read a selection of current opinion pieces on migration law, security, and terror culled from policy reports and newspapers.