Seminar: Politics and Graphic Experiment

Professors: Maryam Kolly, Nicolas Prignot, Alexis Zimmer

This course will familiarize students with the theoretical and methodological approaches of science and post-colonial studies, interrogating the (material and discursive) conditions and effects of scientific practices and the historic conditions driving the production of “otherness” within colonial and capitalist power structures — two phenomena at the roots of Euro-American modernity. Rather than envisioning knowledge as an objective description of reality, this course seeks to grasp and show how science actively contributes to its transformation. How are scientific facts manufactured? How have sciences and colonial power produced racist categories in Europe? How do the major divides between nature and culture, reason and belief, science and politics still contribute to the distribution of privileges and disadvantages, of the roles and the ranks between human beings, but also between humans and other creatures? The course will rely on a selection of texts, images, works and case studies.