Social Thought & Polic. Econ 492H - STPEC Focus Seminar II

Popular Struggles and Revolutionary Praxis in Brazil, South Africa and South Asia
Tues.| 4:00pm ? 6:30pm Inst: Svati Shah
4 credits

By focusing on the cases of Brazil, South Africa, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, this course will examine the popular struggles and revolutionary potential to reshape not only these countries of the Global South, but also the emerging world order more broadly. We will begin with the mid-20th century, examining how the Global South moved from independence and decolonization through the rise of the ?Non-Aligned? Movement of the Cold War era to the present moment. Using films, fiction, historical texts and activist writing, this course will examine varying approaches to left politics, autonomous feminism, queer and trans rights, race, caste, and land rights. These will be treated as vibrant frames of reference shaping mass social movements. The course will then examine instances when these movements have converged, like the World Social Forum process of the early 2000s, as well as how they have mobilized against anti-sodomy law and for LGBTQ+ rights, as in South Asia and South Africa; how they have mobilized through struggles of land rights movements, as in Via Campesina in Brazil and the National Alliance for People?s Movements in India; and in the recent student-led revolts against autocracy in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. More broadly, this course will ask how movements have sought to resist fascism and authoritarianism, with an eye towards how those outside of the Global South can learn to further advance their own demands when the European experience of anti-authoritarian resistance is not our only historical referent for revolutionary struggle. Supplemental readings will be drawn from the Black Radical Tradition and from newer work in Trans Marxism.