Reading and composition courses based upon primary historical documents and secondary historical scholarship. These courses provide an introduction to core issues in the interpretation of historical texts and introduce students to the distinctive ways of reading primary and secondary sources. Courses focus on specific historical topics but address general issues of how historians read and write. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

The 20th century bore witness to the rise of radical, anti-colonial movements in major urban centers of the world, from London, Delhi, Hong Kong, to San Francisco and New York. Its exponents were urban, middle class expatriates fleeing persecution back home, seeking refuge in less restrictive sedition laws and more freedom of expression, or flocking to universities like Oxford, Cambridge, or Berkeley in pursuance of better opportunities. These men (and a few women) held secret rendezvous in crowded boarding houses, assembled in the thriving cafes and restaurants of metropolitan towns, and thronged the street corners and water-fronts to exchange ideas, tactics and technologies on the best ways for running a political movement. In so doing, they became part of a global architecture of revolution, as scholars have postulated. This course takes us on a rapid excursion through this flourishing world of urban politics. We begin our journey at the heart of the British empire where a community of South Asians was quietly congregating in the vaporous street corners and dimly lit taprooms of London, and clustering around rookeries of anti-colonialism like the “India House”. We take a quick detour to the scene of a sensational political crime: the first assassination carried out by a South Asian on British soil, before travelling to the arbored boulevards of Paris and Berlin. The course then turns to another critical site of the underground network—North America. We track the intrepid strategies and modes of resistance deployed by migrants, especially from the working class, as they illegally jumped ships and disappeared into working class neighborhoods in cities like New York in the age of America’s global expansion. We will also read about the revolutionary group Ghadar which, tapping into the extensive Bay Area anarchist and syndicalist networks, was waging a dedicated battle against British colonialism. From here, we meander through the Asian underground—a network of radical intellectuals stretching across major Asian cities—while also reading about interwar Pan-Asian projects. The course will situate this critical history against the backdrop of an expanding governmentality, emergent systems of surveillance and exclusionary immigration laws. The objective of the course is to familiarize students with the politics of South Asian diaspora in the 20th century and explore how the cultural and ideological worlds of modern anti-colonial traditions—the ideas young intellectuals imbibed and disseminated, the solidarities they established, and their engagements with race, gender, religion, class—were made and re-made by the cities they moved in. In addition, the course will train students, through weekly workshops, to refine reading and writing skills. Instructor bio: Shaivya Mishra is a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of History. She finished her PhD at UC Berkeley in 2023. Her areas of interest include decolonization, anti-colonialism, and the history of science and technology.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills