CURRENT COURSES
Spring 2021
Undergraduate Lecture: Cities of the Global South
Fall 2020
Undergraduate Lecture: American Citizenship in Crisis
Graduate Seminar: Revolution
ANTHROPOLOGY 146
CITIES OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH
During the last fifty years, cities in the Global South have exploded: they have become the condensers and conductors of extraordinary urbanization. This course examines their culture and politics. It focuses on the insurgent practices of the urban poor, middle classes, immigrants, youth, street dwellers, under-employed laborers, and “marginals” who not only build these cities but who also, in doing so, transform, derail, and reconstitute the development projects of states, corporations, and world agencies imposed on them in their residence and work. Their insurgent practices include the disruptions of old citizenships, social movements (political, religious, cultural, racial, sexual), illegal land occupations and housing constructions, illicit economies, and transgressive artistic productions.
In our study of the insurgent, we will emphasize conceptualizations and materializations of metropolitan life by investigating urban practice, political imagination, and cultural innovation. Doing so will help problematize the language of chaos, crisis, and disease that is often applied to the new urbanization of the Global South. Our examples will be drawn from cities in Africa, Latin America, China, and India, which we will also juxtapose to cities of the North Atlantic. This juxtaposition will decenter urban theory itself by including “theory from the South” as equally defining of the problematic of contemporary cities. We will emphasize ethnography and document analysis (e.g., of plans, maps, photographs, film, advertising, surveys) as means to identify the cultural and political forces of urbanization amid the apparent cacophony of city life.