Resource Description

Suitable for introductory or humanities survey courses, this module offers teaching resources for a unit on the 1781 Zong massacre. It focuses on artistic responses to the massacre and on how the massacre is a representative event of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The module includes artworks and texts that could be used in the classroom, discussion questions and activities, and a culminating writing prompt. This module invites students to reflect on the gaps in the colonial archive and to think about the role of art and literature in shaping understandings of historical events. It also provides students with an opportunity to recognize how the dehumanizing logic of slavery shaped modernity and how black artists challenge its legacy through their work.

Resource Description

South Asian Modernity and Global Modernism is designed to serve as a learning module to address how South Asians may have understood the concept of modernity during and after the British raj. This is indeed a very broad topic, and the module readings address it in a selective manner, starting with a brief history of the word “modern” in European discourse of the eighteenth century and then addressing writings of selected South Asian thinkers as they adapted many of the characteristics of modernity in their own writings.

The contents of this module can be taught in a week of class time.