Prof Leigh Jenco

This course is available on the MSc in Global Politics and MSc in Political Theory. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is capped at two groups. Priority will be given to students enrolled on the MSc in Political Theory programme. 

This course will examine the consequences of, and responses to, the historic domination of Euro-American forms of knowledge in the field of political theory. Situating political theory as one of many disciplines that reinforce the cultural imperialism of colonial orders, the course will consider how postcolonial theorists have diagnosed this form of epistemic imperialism. We will go on to discuss how recent attempts at forging a “comparative political theory” might (or might not) productively engage more diverse forms of thinking for the purpose of making our conversations about political life more truly global, rather than parochially “Western.” The course will provide students with the vocabulary and conceptual tools to navigate this difficult theoretical terrain, through a focus on a close reading of primary texts, including both classics of postcolonial criticism as well as contemporary work in comparative political theory.

This course is delivered through a combination of seminars and lectures totalling a minimum of 25 hours in the Lent Term. This year, some or all of this teaching may be delivered through a combination of online and on-campus lectures and seminars. There will be a reading week in LT Week 6.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay (1000 words maximum excluding footnotes and bibliography) in the LT.

• Nandy, Ashis. 1988. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Cesaire, Aime. [1956] 2010. “Culture and Colonization.” Social Text 103 (2): 127-144.
• Idris, Murad, Leigh K Jenco, and Megan C. Thomas, eds. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Euben, Roxanne L. 1997. “Comparative Political Theory: An Islamic Fundamentalist Critique of Rationalism.” The Journal of Politics 59 (1): 28–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/2998214.
• Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press.
• Jenco, Leigh. 2015. Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Hokari, Minoru. 2011. Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian in the Outback. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
• Dallmayr, Fred. 2004. “Beyond Monologue: For a Comparative Political Theory.” Perspectives on Politics 2 (2): 124–44.

Essay (45%, 2000 words) and in-class assessment (10%) in the LT.
Essay (45%, 2000 words) in the ST.

Further information:

The 10% assessment will be in the form of a 30 minute, in-class quiz during the LT.

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