HIST 440 - Europe’s East: Orientalisms from Russia to the Balkans

FC SSCI CD WADV

4 credits
This historiography seminar is an exploration of the ‘East’ in Eastern Europe. Where does a certain cultural imaginary of Eastern Europe come from? How has Europe’s ‘periphery’ been both constructed as ‘other’ and worked to produce its own ‘others’ in turn? Through secondary theoretical literatures and primary sources (including political tracts, novels, paintings, poetry, and film) we will examine scholarly debates on the position that Russia and the Balkans have held in modern histories of difference-making–between empire and colony, between ‘backwards’ and ‘advanced’, between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds. We will discover that this is a region which has served as both subject and object of Orientalizing practices and discourses–an uneven and liminal space whose very complexities afford us a privileged window into understanding global histories of knowledge, power, and difference.