FREN4437 · Romance Languages and Literatures

No Man is an Island: The Origins of Inequality

Morrissey College of Arts & Sciences

Conducted in French and Fulfills one of the 4000-level requirements for French majors. The early modern period, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, saw a profusion of accounts of travels to what Europeans thought of as new lands. Islands in particular served as a laboratory for re-envisaging the basic social and natural relationships that shaped human life. These travel narratives fueled European thinking about both politics and nature, re-making the relationship between them, as well as that between literature and politics, perhaps most famously in Jean-Jacques Rousseau'sDiscourse on the Origins of Inequality. That text will be the centerpiece of this class: we will study it in detail together with extracts from the many travel writings to which it refers. We will attend to how these texts present indigenous perspectives and study archival materials that highlight the absences of genuine indigenous perspectives from these dialogues. We will ask to what extent such writings necessarily established or destabilized relationships of inequality between humans and nature, among humans, and between Europeans and Indigenous peoples. But we will also be attentive to how the island encounter between nature and the political has played out in much more recent times, whether in twentieth-century theoretical writings on Rousseau, Cesaire'sNotebook of a Return to my Native Land, or Graeber & Wengrow's bestseller from 2021, The Dawn of Everything.