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.

The Importance of Being Quite Certain

Week 1 — What Is Being Studied When We Study “Whiteness”?

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.

Week 2 — Europe Before Confidence

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.

Week 3 — Universalism as a Local Solution

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.

Week 4 — Knowledge, Classification, Control

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.

Week 5 — Colonialism as Institutional Necessity

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.

Week 6 — Colonial Psychology

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.

Week 7 — Decolonization and Authority Collapse

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.

Week 8 — Post-Colonialism: Rule Without Rule

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.

Week 9 — Development, Aid, and Moral Accounting

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.

Week 10 — Institutions That Cannot End

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.

Week 11 — Contemporary Whiteness and Fragility

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.

Week 12 — Final Lecture and Presentations

Students present institutional analyses tracing: Canonical idea → administrative form → contemporary afterlife