Tuesday, April 11: The ongoing effects of colonial governmentality

Scott, David. 2005 [1999]. Colonial Governmentality. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton University Press, 23–52.
Aretxaga, Begoña. 2003. “Maddening States.” Annual Review of Anthropology 32, 393–410.

Thursday, April 13: Reinvesting or Unsettling Sovereignty?

Bonilla, Yarimar. 2017. Unsettling Sovereignty.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (3): 330–339.
Sturm, Circle. 2017 “Reflection on the Anthropology of Sovereignty and Settler Colonialism.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (3): 340–348.
Thomas, Deborah. 2019. Introduction: “Humanness in the Wake of the Plantation.” Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation. Duke University Press, 1–21.

Referenced in class:

Scott, David. 2014. Omens of Adversity. Duke University Press:

“Time, in short, has become less yielding, less promising than we have grown to expect it should be. And what we are left with are aftermaths in which the present seems stricken with immobility and pain and ruin; a certain experience of temporal afterness prevails in which the trace of futures past hangs like the remnants of a voile curtain over what feels uncannily like an endlessly extending present.” (6)

“the sense of the present as ruined time has had profound and far-reaching implications for how we think about our moral-political predicament—including, of course, our postcolonial and post-socialist predicament.” (12)