杏吧论坛

Dr Cristobal Garibay-Petersen CBG.7.06

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe, MSc in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe (杏吧论坛 & Sciences Po), MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in European and International Public Policy, MSc in European and International Public Policy (杏吧论坛 and Bocconi), MSc in European and International Public Policy (杏吧论坛 and Sciences Po), MSc in History of International Relations, MSc in International Migration and Public Policy, MSc in International Migration and Public Policy (杏吧论坛 and Sciences Po), MSc in Political Economy of Europe, MSc in Political Economy of Europe (杏吧论坛 and Fudan) and MSc in Political Economy of Europe (杏吧论坛 and Sciences Po). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). In previous years we have been able to provide places for all students that apply but that may not continue to be the case.

This course examines the role played by the idea of the Americas in the European imaginary and examines ‘Europe’, in turn, from the American context. By looking into processes of colonisation, decolonisation, modernisation, and globalisation, the course investigates the assumptions upon which different conceptions of the Americas have been construed, and seeks to understand the political, socio-cultural, and philosophical implications of those conceptions both for Europe and for the Americas. The course adopts a hybrid approach by making use of both European and American perspectives, and critically engages dichotomies such as settler/settled, coloniser/colonised, domination/subjugation, and self/other, to better understand the Americas and Europe.

The course follows a chronological order by looking, first, at the way in which early European explorers incorporated the so-called New World into their predominantly Christian worldview. It then maps the subsequent transformations of what the Americas signified through the European Enlightenment, through the 19th and 20th centuries of modern industrial states, and into the time of geopolitics, all the while remaining attentive to the changing role of the American conception of Europe. In doing so, the course shows the significance of different ideas of the Americas for what Europe understands as its own history, i.e. world-history: from an idea generated by complex mechanisms of othering that placed the Americas outside of European time and history to an