Non-Human History

Seminar Readings:

Timothy Mitchell, ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?’ in Rule of Experts (California Univ. Press, 2002): 19-53.

Katayoun Shafiee, Chapter 3 “Calculating Technologies in Crisis” in Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (The MIT Press, 2018).

OR: ‘A Petro-formula and its World Formula and its World: Calculating Profits, Production, and Labor in the Assembling of Anglo-Iranian Oil,’ Economy & Society (2012): 11-17.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: 4 Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197-222.

Further Readings:

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Harvard University Press, 2005).

Callon, Michel. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay,” in The Science Studies Reader, edited by Bruno Biagioli, 67-94. New York: Routledge, 1999.

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton & Company, 1991).

Seminar/Essay Questions:

• What difference does it make for historical analysis to say that a mosquito can ‘speak’ as in the colonial history of Egypt? Or the calculative device of a formula as with oil in Iran?
• In what ways does doing this alter our understanding of the historical operation of power and agency?
• How does our current predicament of climate catastrophe compel us to rethink historical analysis to take seriously the role of non-human actors?
• Why does taking seriously the role of non-human actors as necessarily coeval and interconnected with humans alter the way we understand questions of representation or who has the right to speak on behalf of the many, often silenced and disempowered, actors (human and non-human) and worlds mobilised in the historical and contemporary accounts we have?