Research Seminar (395-0-22)
Topic
Myths of the Aryans
Instructors
Rajeev Kumar Kinra
847/467-1241
Harris Hall - Room 307
Rajeev Kinra is an associate professor of South Asian history and comparative literature at Northwestern University, specializing in early modern Indo-Persian literary and political culture, especially under the Mughal Empire and during the early phase of British colonialism in India. His first book, Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary (2015), received the 2019 Mohammad Habib Memorial Prize, awarded by the Indian History Congress for the best book on medieval or early modern Indian history published between 2015-2018. Author of numerous scholarly articles, Kinra also served from 2020-2024 on the editorial board of the Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI), and from 2016-2023 on the academic Advisory Panel of the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme (EAP).
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-343: Tues, Thurs 3:30PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
"Myths of the Aryans: A Prehistory of White Supremacy":
The term "Aryan," and the concept of an "Aryan race," are nowadays most commonly associated with Nazi Germany, or with subsequent white supremacist movements that have sought to channel or even resurrect Nazi ideology and racial theories. However, the common belief that "Aryanism" was solely a "Nazi thing" is mistaken. In fact, many of the racial theories that the Nazis adopted and ultimately put to such despicable use in the 1930s and '40s had much deeper roots in modern European and American intellectual history more generally, dating back at least to late eighteenth-century British colonial India. This course aims to revisit this unpleasant, and largely forgotten, history of the pervasiveness of the Aryan idea in post-Enlightenment Euro-American thought — not in order to let the Nazis off the hook for their own sins, but rather to put them in context, and to reckon with the ways in which a much broader spectrum of modern intellectuals throughout the Western world are implicated in ideas about Aryan-ness than is usually acknowledged today, with disastrous consequences for colonized, indigenous, and other marginalized populations around the world over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. Much of this history is ugly, and many of the people we will read (or read about) were openly racist and antisemitic in a way that most people today would find jarring, abhorrent, and even triggering. But, at a time when such racial supremacist ideas are gaining alarmingly renewed currency, not just in Europe and America but throughout the world, it is vital that those who would seek to combat them are able to understand the deeper intellectual historical context in which they first emerged and were later perpetuated.
Learning Objectives
Students Will (FD-HS):
•Identify, develop, and execute an original historical research project, generating productive and open-ended questions about the past and finding ways to answer them.
•Locate primary and secondary sources, evaluate them, decide whether they are relevant, and marshal them on behalf of a substantive argument about the past.
•Position your original research within a broader web of historical research, establishing yourself as part of a scholarly conversation across time and space.
Students Will (Advanced Expression):
•Refine your historical writing skills in a substantive research paper (usually 20-25 pages in length) developed over the course of the term.
•Make a clear, concise, persuasive, and evenhanded argument while paying attention to complexity and nuance.
•Receive constructive feedback on research and writing throughout the term.
•Explore the interrelationship between thinking and writing by drafting, revising, and editing to clarify ideas and arguments.
•Assess the relationship between narrative and argument.
Evaluation Method
Short papers during the quarter; final research paper (20-25pp)
Class Materials (Required)
Materials will be available on Canvas.
Class Attributes
Advanced Expression
Historical Studies Foundational Discipline
Historical Studies Distro Area
Enrollment Requirements
Enrollment Requirements: Only History majors and minors can currently enroll in this class.
Freshmen may not register for this course.