Courses

This course uses primary documents and supplemental readings from two “frontiers” in order to study how colonialism has created different conditions of the ancestral present; how archival “cores” effect the possibility of documenting ancestral heritability; and how text-based documentation mediate how different frontiers are imagined and governed. The course will focus on two frontier regions: the Alpine region of Trentino and the coastal region of the Northern Territory of Australia, centering on the turn of the 18th to 19th century. The course examines the dynamics between colonialism and liberal governance--how the European conquest of the western Atlantic and Pacific continues to transform modes of liberal governance long after the first colonial fleets disgorged their armies, explorers, and settlers. It approaches a turn in the politics of difference by tracking how two sets of clans have moved through historical forms of the ancestral present, namely, changing imaginaries of social form, time, and heritability; and how these imaginaries emerge from and materially sediment into human bodies and the more-than-human world. The clans are, on the one hand, the Simonaz clan, patronym, Povinelli, and Bartolot clan, patronym, Ambrosi from Carisolo, Trentino; and, on the other hand, the totemic clans of the Karrabing that stretch along the coastal region of Anson Bay, Northern Territory, Australia.