Tuesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
Dr. Maura O’Connor
This seminar will examine the relationship between decolonization and the history of Europe and America’s engagement with neoliberalism and its attendant political cultures. That instead of understanding the second half of the twentieth century and the early decades of the twenty first as being primarily shaped by the experiences of World War II as scholars such as Tony Judt in Postwar (2005), among others, have argued, the history of the more recent past, even in its nativist and populist forms, has been shaped by decolonization. Apart from examining the end of European empires during the Cold War, we will also explore what role decolonization had on the various revolts of 1968 and the counter-revolutions they inspired and created, as well as their influence on the formation of newly interpreted forms of advanced financial capitalism and the political economies and cultures created by neoliberalism. The seminar will stretch chronologically from the 1940s to 2008 and its aftermath and geographically it will work outwards from (predominantly western) Europe and the United States.
