HGS 268 - Special Topics in Genocide

May be repeated for credit

SPRING 2025- SECTION 01- WAR AND GENOCIDE IN MODERN EASTERN EUROPE, USSR, AND POST-SOVIET SPACE

The Modern History of Eastern Europe is marked by the interplay of devastating wars, genocides, revolutions and mass violence, collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, birth of nation-states, rise and fall of communism under Soviet rule and turbulences in the post-Soviet space. In 21st century Eastern Europe is one of the deadliest places in the world due to ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine, which threatens the future security architecture in Europe and beyond. What were the reasons for wars and genocides in the studied region? How has extreme violence shaped people’s everyday lives, choices and survival strategies? How do race, class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality interplay during war and genocide? What were the socio-economic, political and cultural effects of war and genocides? How and why are wars and genocides remembered, commemorated, and forgotten? Can the history of wars teach us about peace? In order to answer those questions, the course will cover the most significant and deadliest wars in the region: The Great War, WWII and the Russo-Ukrainian War, as well as smaller conflicts in Georgia and Moldova. At the center of the analyses will be numerous cases of genocides, including Holodomor, the Holocaust, and the genocide of Crimean Tatars. 

SPRING 2025- SECTION 02-  HORROR, MONSTROSITY, AND WESTERN CULTURAL ANXIETIES

More than any other genre, horror is the most revealing in its ability to project a diagnosis of collective anxiety. The monstrous figure, while culturally specific, is a universal reflection and expression of fear, repulsion, fury, and even desire. This seminar engages manifestations of political and social life and how they are turned into various forms of monstrosity. Engaging cinematic and literary monsters alongside social conditions that exploit humanity (fascism, slavery, and minstrelsy) or pervert its “ideal state” (disability, relative ugliness, gender non-conformity), we will explore the genealogy of monstrosity not simply as an abnormality, but as a revelation. This course aspires to excavate the many registers of monstrosity in search of what makes it such a popular and recurring site of meaning-making.

SPRING 2025- SECTION 03- LOOKING AT VIOLENCE: EPISTEMES OF ATROCITY

Following a trajectory of camera technologies, this seminar will explore the political function of the atrocity image - whether of the brutalities of a battleground or genocide killing field, or the classical humanitarian image of starving children, or filled to the brim refugee camps. Through critical readings and close image studies, this seminar will attend to the episteme of the atrocity image, taking seriously attempts to mobilize empathy and philanthropic action, or, conversely, to normalize and justify violence. From the humanitarian campaign in the Belgian Congo to 20th century lynching photography to the still-ongoing Global War on Terror to widely circulated images of Black people brutalized by the police, students will engage familiar arguments about the potential of photographs and videos to elicit empathy or whether the global dissemination of these images actually reifies the distance between the self and the racial, cultural, social, and civilizational “Other.”

FALL 2024- SECTION 01- SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WAR AND GENOCIDE

The course analyses sexual violence in wars and genocides around the globe and throughout modern history. Examples include the genocides of Native Americans, Armenians, and Jews; those in Namibia, Rwanda¸ Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, and Darfur; wars and armed conflicts in different times and areas, including Russia’s current war in Ukraine. It explores various forms of sexual violence, such as rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy or abortion, forced marriage, forced prostitution, forced sterilization, genital mutilation, castration, penectomy, and forced nudity. Special attention is dedicated to the analysis of the causes of sexual violence. It analyses how genocidal language, hate speech, antisemitism, racism, imperialism, and concepts of masculinity facilitate sexual violence in armed conflicts.  The course also examines the short- and long-term traumatic physical, psychological, and mental effects of sexual violence on victims and survivors; methods of dealing with the consequences of sexual violence in terms of medical, psychological, social, financial, and legal help for survivors and their communities. Finally, the course zeroes in on challenges in prosecuting sexual violence in conflicts and genocides and explains why so many perpetrators went unpunished and enjoyed impunity. 

FALL 2024- SECTION 02- ILLNESS AND IMPERIALISM: A GLOBAL SURVEY

Over the past several centuries, the European imperial encounter with communities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania has led to racialized understandings of the body as well as new imaginaries of disease and unwellness. Although Europeans often struggled to adapt to these colonial terrains, it was the pathologization of the illnesses experienced by the native that overwhelmingly became the object of study. This seminar will consider tropical diseases, chronic and mental illnesses, historical and present pandemics, and physical disabilities that make up the global public health agenda. It will enable students to better understand the intersections of geopolitical and medical definitions of unhealth, strategies of containment and treatment, and geographic disparities in health outcomes. 

SPRING 2024- SECTION 02- Anti-Black Violence and Sociologies of the Body (Politic)

Beyond the systematized categories of “race” that emerged out of colonial encounters, anti-blackness, specifically, has been a nuclear means of organizing Euroamerican sociality and political economy since the exclusive enslavement of Africans in the 15th century. Through the tethering of race to forced labor, capital, and property, blackness has come to be a nuclear means of defining dominant cultural and biosocial conventions. Anti-blackness, thus, has critically inflected the very notion of modernity itself. In consideration of treatments of black people themselves and constructions of blackness, this seminar considers the hegemonic western definitions and reinforcements of morality, healthfulness/illness and disability, gender and beauty, entertainment, animality, criminality, and more as they all pertain to ideas of citizenship and belonging.

FALL 2023- SECTION 01- SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN WAR AND GENOCIDE

The course analyses sexual violence in wars and genocides around the globe and throughout modern history. Examples include the genocides of Native Americans, Armenians, and Jews; those in Namibia, Rwanda¸ Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, and Darfur; wars and armed conflicts in different times and areas, including Russia’s current war in Ukraine. It explores various forms of sexual violence, such as rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy or abortion, forced marriage, forced prostitution, forced sterilization, genital mutilation, castration, penectomy, and forced nudity. Special attention is dedicated to the analysis of the causes of sexual violence. It analyses how genocidal language, hate speech, antisemitism, racism, imperialism, and concepts of masculinity facilitate sexual violence in armed conflicts.  The course also examines the short- and long-term traumatic physical, psychological, and mental effects of sexual violence on victims and survivors; methods of dealing with the consequences of sexual violence in terms of medical, psychological, social, financial, and legal help for survivors and their communities. Finally, the course zeroes in on challenges in prosecuting sexual violence in conflicts and genocides and explains why so many perpetrators went unpunished and enjoyed impunity. 

FALL 2023- SECTION 02 ”LOOKING AT VIOLENCE”

“What does it mean to develop an ethic of seeing genocide and mass violence?

Informally following a trajectory of camera technologies, this seminar will explore the political function of the atrocity image - whether of the brutalities of a battleground or genocide killing field, or the classical humanitarian image of starving children or filled to the brim refugee camps. Through critical readings and close image studies, will attend to the episteme of the atrocity image, taking seriously contextual attempts to mobilize empathy and philanthropic action, or, conversely, normalize and justify violence. From the first humanitarian campaign in the Belgian Congo to 20th century lynching photography and genocides, the still-ongoing Global War on Terror to widely circulated images of Black people brutalized by the police, students will engage images as well as familiar competing arguments about visual regimes that yield these empathy-producing texts or whether the proliferation of these images actually reifies the distance between oneself and the racial, cultural, social, and civilizational ‘Other.’ We will interrogate the ontology of the regime of photography, critically engaging the implications of the camera’s ‘capture’ and enclosure of political and civil imaginaries through the image’s staging and destruction of worlds and the peoples within them.”

Anticipated Terms Offered: Varies