Standing Instruction
Canonical Western texts are assigned as historical problem-solving documents. Students are not asked what these texts mean universally, but what conditions they presuppose and what instabilities they attempt to resolve.
Core Frame
Whiteness as historical object, not moral identity
Normativity vs. contingency
Readings
W. E. B. Du Bois — The Souls of Black Folk (selected chapters)
Stuart Hall — “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”
Canonical Problematic (CPR)
René Descartes — Meditations (cogito excerpt)
Why here
Descartes introduces self-grounding certainty as a response to epistemic instability.
Whiteness enters not as race, but as the invisible subject position that does not need to name itself.
Assignment
Concept memo — define whiteness without reference to race.
Core Frame
Scarcity, fragmentation, marginality
Why Europe universalized when others did not
Readings
Fernand Braudel — The Mediterranean (excerpt)
Immanuel Wallerstein — World-systems overview
Canonical Problematic
Thomas Hobbes — Leviathan (state of nature)
Why here
Hobbes reads cleanly as projection from European precarity.
The “state of nature” becomes Europe’s imagined mirror, not a universal condition.
Core Frame
Christianity → Enlightenment → Liberalism
Continuity rather than rupture
Readings
Michel Foucault — The Order of Things (excerpt)
Canonical Problematic
Immanuel Kant — Groundwork (universality of moral law)
Why here
Kant’s universality is reread as anxiety management in the face of plural moral worlds.
Assignment
Short essay — universalism as technology.
Core Frame
Taxonomy, cartography, anthropology
Knowing as stabilizing
Readings
Edward Said — Orientalism (Intro + Ch. 1)
Canonical Problematic
Francis Bacon — Novum Organum (knowledge as power)
Why here
Bacon naturalizes extraction of truth from the world.
Classification appears as reassurance through mastery.
Core Frame
Empire as internal European solution
Administration over violence
Readings
Aníbal Quijano — “Coloniality of Power”
Canonical Problematic
John Locke — Second Treatise (property chapters)
Why here
Locke’s property theory becomes the moral grammar of seizure, not an abstract right.
Core Frame
Projection, dependence, hierarchy
Colonizer as unstable subject
Readings
Frantz Fanon — Black Skin, White Masks
Canonical Problematic
David Hume — essays on civilization / human nature
Why here
Hume exposes the affective underside of Enlightenment reason — taste, sentiment, ranking.
Assignment
Analyze a colonial practice as white self-regulation.
Core Frame
Loss of command
Rise of nostalgia and grievance
Readings
Aimé Césaire — Discourse on Colonialism
Canonical Problematic
G. W. F. Hegel — Philosophy of History (teleology)
Why here
Hegel’s history reads as retrospective reassurance just as empire begins to fracture.
Core Frame
Governance replaces empire
Language replaces force
Readings
Achille Mbembe — On the Postcolony
Canonical Problematic
John Stuart Mill — On Liberty (with colonial writings)
Why here
Mill’s developmental logic explains why freedom can be indefinitely postponed.
Core Frame
NGOs as legitimacy infrastructure
Endless process, deferred resolution
Readings
James Ferguson — The Anti-Politics Machine
Canonical Problematic
Adam Smith — Wealth of Nations (selected)
Why here
Markets appear as ethical offloading mechanisms — order without responsibility.
Core Frame
Museums, academia, global governance
Why closure is impossible
Readings
Mark Fisher — Institutional affect
Canonical Problematic
Max Weber — bureaucracy and rationalization
Why here
Weber names the emotional deadness that institutions then reproduce endlessly.
Core Frame
Offense, grievance, proceduralism
Why critique feels like erasure
Readings
Seminar-only (no new texts)
Canonical Echo
Short revisits to Kant / Mill / Smith excerpts as resurfacing logics
Why
Students recognize the canon still speaking, but now without authority.
Students present institutional analyses tracing: Canonical idea → administrative form → contemporary afterlife