HUM 368 | A Precious Barbarism: Enlightenment, Ideology, and Colonialism

This course presents a constellation of influential critiques of Western intellectual history, especially examining Enlightenment liberalism and its ideological afterlives. Themes include: critique, Euro-American centrism, orientalism, de-colonial struggles, postcolonial theory, pathologies of freedom, power, hegemony, racialization, identity, liberalism, the democratic illusion, mass deception, the Holocaust, camps, mass migration, terrorism, comprador intellectuals, and culture war. Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment provides the starting point for our humanist and aesthetic critique via readings of Homer, mythology, philosophy, and religion. Important "non-western" authors might include Aime Cesiare, Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Sylvia Wynter, Gayatri Spivak, and Hamid Dabashi.