ANTHR 4745 - Colonial Intersections: Jews and Native Americans

(crosslisted) AMST 4740, JWST 4745, NES 4745
(CA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with ANTHR 7745/JWST 7745/NES 7745.

J. Boyarin, C. Uran.

The colonial expansion of Christian Europe continues to leave its mark on the world of the twenty-first century. Two of the peoples caught up in that colonial project, in very different ways, are Jews and Native Americans. Indeed, these two groups were often conflated in the colonial imagination, with Native Americans imagined as the “lost tribes,” and missionary rhetorics first aimed at Jews (and Muslims) being adapted for Native Americans. This course looks at the differing structural positions of Jews (the “other within” Christian Europe) and Native Americans (the “other without”). It also considers these peoples’ varying responses to colonialism, and their relations with each other, to ask how we can compare forms of difference while retaining the richness of their distinctive formations.