Professor Anustup Basu

Tue, 12:30-02:50PM

Keeping the Covid 19 pandemic in mind, in this class we will look at a set of texts to understand the biopolitical and governmental restructuring of European societies after the French revolution. Europe suffered half a dozen cholera pandemics in the course of the long 19th century and lost millions of people, but not to the extent in which the Black Death of the 14th century wiped out a significant portion of its population. The pandemics were checked to the extent that western European powers were able to meet the key historical condition for the flourishing of capital and empire: able and healthy bodies to man the factories and the colonies. This was largely achieved without germ theory (until the final quarter of the 19th century) and the basic knowledge that cholera was a waterborne disease. It was done with novel technologies to order space and circulating bodies, air, and water, new ways of record keeping and archiving information, distributing risk, and a general mathematization of all details of lived life, from minimum daily nutritional requirements to the age of consent. It was the medical bureaucracy that stipulated that corpses should be buried six feet under the ground, and not the clergy. We will read Foucault, Esposito, Chatterjee, de Landa and others to understand the history and politics of this template of biopolitical modernity that has acquired new electronic and informational powers in our times. Students will be expected to actively participate in discussions and write a 20-25 page term paper at the end of the semester.