COLT 49.08 Politics of the Maritime: Seas and Empires
From classical Athens to global modernity, western political communities have a maritime origin. The sea introduces human beings toward the strange and the unknown. It drives members of a specific political community to push ever beyond the bonds of their own city walls. The sea entices human beings to leave the homeland and to seek fortunes in foreign lands, to discover new territories and to found novel political institutions. This course will examine the various ways in which human beings invent themselves and their communities via encounters with the maritime. Selections will be drawn from the Genesis, Euripides, Cicero, Shakespeare, Melville, Duras, Walcott, the theories of Schmitt, Agamben, Mbembe, Glissant and Serres, as well as histories of the Black Atlantic and postcolonial Cambodian cinema. How do different encounters with the maritime form and transform our self-understanding and our relationship with those around us? How does the need to go beyond our territorial boundaries teach us about freedom and the nature of being human? How can the sea change our conception of the political? How can we comprehend the maritime origin of both western civilization and our own global modernity?
Instructor
Wu