ANTH 2118 Revolutionary Cities:
Urban Uprisings in Paris and Barcelona
Paris in French Revolution, 1871 Paris Commune, and May 1968. Barcelona in Catalan nationalism, Spanish Revolution. Political ideologies of revolution, theories of power, forms of self-organization, and protest tactics. Role of art, collective gatherings, and performance in revolution. Legacies of revolution in contemporary politics, social movements, and urban uprisings. (from the course catalog)
Course Description and Invitation
This course looks at the phenomenon of revolution through the history and present political traditions of two cities that have been at the heart of major political upheavals for the last two-hundred fifty years: Paris and Barcelona.
A revolution is a momentous period in which people make history by purposely changing the political balance of power. It is also a collective performance in which people who have lived lives outside of customary statecraft suddenly create rituals to refuse an old order and inaugurate a new one. Street protests aspire to embody national popular sovereignty and can claim it through surprisingly ceremonial action. A crowd moves from fighting with police to intoning the national anthem. A plaza filled with people declares itself a popular assembly representing the city, or the country. The burning down of a jail becomes the symbolic birth of a democratic nation.
The vast majority of governments worldwide trace their legitimacy to a revolution. And modern ideas of revolution can, in part, be traced to the French Revolution, led largely by metropolitan Paris. Likewise, socialist revolutionaries look back to the Paris Commune of 1871 and anarchists also to the Spanish Republic, which achieved greatest transformation in Catalunya from 1936 to 1939. Student, youth, and labor protests combined in France’s extraordinary May 1968 uprising. These diverse revolutions have shaped the meaning of political action in both cities and the countries of which they are a part. Workers, racial minorities, squatters, nationalists, and political radical continue to use revolutionary ideas, symbols, and tactics in contemporary movements in both cities.
The heart of this course is on-site presence in the urban spaces of Paris and Barcelona (and briefly Marseille) where people collectively demanded and sometimes achieved political change. This course allows students to encounter the history and process of revolutions while encountering the spaces where they took place, the art and ideas that surrounded them, and the political traditions that emerged from these dramatic events. We will inhabit these cities that were shaped by revolution and meet participants in contemporary social movements that embrace the legacies of resisting and radically rethinking political power.
The central requirements of the course are to engage with these places, their histories, and practical forms of evidence about urban uprisings, and effectively and vividly retell their stories. Students will contribute to a joint course blog on revolution in Paris and Barcelona. Small-group research projects will gather evidence from museums, archives, libraries, and other sources on one particular event of momentous political change.
Revolutionary Cities 