History and Politics – (M.A.)

Contents

The Core CoursePopular Movements: Debates and Methodologies

This is led by Dr Allison Drew and Professor Alan Forrest. The course consists of sixteen seminars held weekly during the Autumn and Spring terms. The syllabus is designed to familiarise students with methodological problems central to the study of popular movements. After an introductory session which raises the methodological problems involved in the recovery of popular movements, attention focuses on major theoretical traditions - Marx, Weber and Foucault. These are supplemented by an assessment of the potential and pitfalls of comparative analysis focussing on the work of Barrington Moore. Equipped with these frameworks and aware of the problems, three types of popular movements are examined - European revolutionary; fascist and proto-fascist; anti-colonial and post-colonial. The focus is on seminal and often controversial texts in each area. In the second term a range of analytical issues are addressed around the broad themes of ideology and power. These include debates about the concept of ideology, supplemented by the study of popular beliefs and millenarianism, class, gender and nationalism, and the state. Once again, the discussion considers influential texts, but these will be examined in the context of the methodological issues raised earlier in the course.

Teaching will be by members of both departments to facilitate debate about the strengths and weaknesses of approaches developed within each discipline.

Option Courses
Option courses examine specific topics and complement the core course. The courses below illustrate the range of available options. These may vary from year to year depending on staff interests and availability. Current History Options include:

Gendering the Exotic, Exoticising Gender

The subject of this course is the interaction between ideas, images, and practices associated with gender, and those associated with imperial, racial, and colonial developments in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and France. It will examine how the history and patterns of gender identities, differences and relationships were shaped by the imperial racialising and colonialist features of those societies, and how those features were in turn shaped by gender considerations. Our aim will be to understand more about the way in which these areas of human experience and social construction became entwined and mutually reinforcing in spheres of life ranging from artistic and literary creativity to politics, advertising and religion.

Youth, Gender and Society, 1860-1940

The rise of the women's movement and a distinctive feminist intellectual critique have had a significant influence on the parallel gender definitions and discussions of and about men and masculinity. Although now often conducted in a different intellectual language, such debates are not new. Nineteenth and early twentieth century Anglophone cultures were also richly informed by debates about manliness and its proper character. Often these debates were conducted as part of a wider discussion about the education and training of young men of both the upper and lower classes. Another mode concentrated on the notion of unmanly character and conduct, and in a cultural climate which was coming to categorise man-to-man relations in new and at times disturbing ways. This section of the course will look at some of these debates and investigate how late twentieth-century approaches to gender inform and are informed by the debates of the last century.

From Body Beautiful to Body Politic: The Politics of the Body in England, 1600-1700

This course will explore the somatic within various aspects of early modern English culture. It aims not simply to survey or catalogue seventeenth-century understandings of the body, but to use "the body" as a way to open up early modern understandings of gender, power and social distinction. It will also introduce students to a wide range of the sources and the ways in which they can be read and interpreted. For each seminar we will discuss a selection of short texts (often in the form of extracts) dealing with that week's theme. These passages - drawn from medical, natural philosophical, religious, didactic, satirical and literary texts, as well as diaries, court depositions and other manuscript sources - will be discussed alongside the wider historiography of early modern England and on occasions works of social theory which may assist us in interpreting their meanings. As one aim of the course is to familiarize students with the use of primary material, students will be expected to use early printed books in Special Collections in the JBM library and in York Minster Library.

Cultural History of Revolutionary France

The French Revolution was essentially a political movement, involving the massive rejection of many of the assumptions which underpinned Ancien Regime government and public life. But its impact spread far beyond governmental practice: in its attack on what went before it set itself against privilege, and privilege lay at the very base of eighteenth-century French society. The Revolutionaries quickly become aware that they were challenging not just the monarchy and the institutions of the Ancien regime, but also the basic assumptions on which French social and intellectual life had been based. Their task was nothing less than the creation of a new political culture in France - where necessary violently and iconoclastically - and it is the aim of this course to explain the process.

Women, Enlightenment and Revolution

This course will examine how perceptions of the gendered boundaries of public and private lives were changing in western Europe from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, in a variety of different social, political and cultural contexts. This period saw the growth and shaping of the western nation-state, and the writing of many different versions of 'modernity'. It also saw the emergence of radical and revolutionary movements seeking to remodel older forms of social and political life. Such movements have not always been seen in gendered terms; here we look at women of all classes in public, at women as political agents, at the gendering of politics and at its relationship to feminism in this period.

History and Heritage

Heritage is frequently criticised as a form of cultural fast food which has commodified history and replaced sensitivity to context and anachronism with sentimental and comforting images of a past that never was. But might such criticisms merely reflect the snobbery of the History profession and the privileged place it still accords to the written work over visual and verbal testimonies? Shouldn´t we acknowledge more fully the fact that the vast majority of people, in both present and previous societies, have experienced and reached an understanding of the past outside the academic context and continue to do so? Examination of the various "non-academic" ways in which this awareness of previous ages has been structured and developed in Britain over the past five hundred years (with particular emphasis on the present) will therefore constitute a unifying theme of this course. We shall build on the fundamental insight that Heritage has its own history and consider, as we do so, the implications these "extra-curricular" or "unofficial" engagements with the past have for our own working practices as academic historians.

History and Memory

Slaves and Slavery

Current Politics options include:

Comparative Labour Movements

An analysis of key problems in the politics of labour movements. Issues examined will include the relationship between workplace experience and community activities - and the development of political organization and consciousness; the relative strengths of labour, social-democratic, and communist parties as expressions of working-class politics and issues of ethnicity, nationalism, and gender. Cases will be drawn from a range of societies and periods.

Comparative Women´s Movements

This is an interdisciplinary course that examines women´s participation in a range of social and political movements in different regions of the world. It begins by considering the problems involved in comparing women from diverse national, ethnic and class backgrounds. It then addresses a range of themes, including women´s collective action and the limits of female solidarity, women´s participation in anti-colonial and national liberation movements, women´s participation in socialist and revolutionary movements, feminist movements, women´s movements and the state, and international and transnational women´s movements. It also considers various explanations of political consciousness displayed by women involved in social and political movements.

South African Politics: Selected Themes

This module provides an in-depth examination of South African politics. It focuses on the relationship of class, ethnicity and gender in South African development; the historical development of the national liberation movement; and the transition to democracy and problems of development in post-apartheid South Africa.

The Contemporary European City In Comparative Perspective

This option explores the development of the European city over the past 100 years focussing on contrasting forms of urban government, policy-making, urban political economy, political economy, political mobilisation, and political identities in London, Paris, Milan and Berlin. The module will combine empirical case-study material with the analysis of classical and contemporary urban theory.

Marxist Theory

This module will explore certain key issues in Marxist theory which have both aroused controversy among Marxists and criticism from their opponents. Among the issues covered are the forces and relations of production; base and superstructure; class and exploitation; ideology and culture. The course will examine the questions raised by these concepts in the light of debates within the various Marxist traditions notably classical Marxism (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Gramsci) and Western Marxism (including Lukacs, the Frankfurt School, Althusser) - as well as more recent developments, for example in what has become known as `analytical Marxism´ (G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, John Roemer, et al.).