Western civilization
Each questions one page
1) How does the view of colonialism in Marx and Conrad change our understanding of the ‘western’ part of the history of Western Civilization?
2) How does our view of slavery in Seth Rockman change our view of the origins of capitalism.
3) How does chapter 16 of Toni Morrison’s Beloved help us illustrate the interconnected nature of law (The Fugitive Slave act of 1850), economics, and race during the ante-bellum American South?
4) Describe three ways that Elie Wiesel uses memory as a tool to help us think and empathize with the experience of Jews in Nazi Germany rather than explain the Holocaust through facts and figures.
5) Final reflection: how has modern America created a panoptic society that uses surveillance to define who is included and excluded in American society and how is it related to the history of race in America?
Here is the link for “Triumph of the Will” which illustrates not only a project of an ideal German volk, but also operates as a surveillance of what the the volk must look like…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
please look for the ways in which the 2 camp mentality emerges here, one seen, one unseen, one heard, one silenced. The logic of Nazi society depends on the creation of the Jews and other groups on the margins as social “others.” There are two camps that create fundamentally different forms of sociability, but are inserable from each other. We will read about the tragic camp of the social other this weekend, but for now we are going to witness the mythology that drove Nazism and we need to look for the Enlightenment logic that stands behind it. Nazism wasn’t anti-western, but it was written in the very fabric of the western experience
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