Cops, Cartels and Cash Crops: The Drug Trade in the Americas, 1900 to the Present (HIST0790)

Images of ‘Drug Wars’ today dominate popular perceptions of Latin America. The news is full of stories about cartel shoot-outs in Mexico, while television series like Narcos have made Pablo Escobar a figure familiar to millions. This course will examine the development of drug production and trafficking in the Americas. It will assess the role of the region’s governments – including the US – in the development of the contemporary drug trade; its impact on local societies, political systems, economies and cultures; and pay special attention to both academic and popular/media portrayals and understandings of the drug war, and the effects of drug use, production and drug-related violence on marginalised groups like indigenous peasants, disenfranchised youth, and women.

Western observers have primarily looked upon post-war Eastern Europe as the homeland of crisis: a region where history favours the dramatic props of show...

All Quiet on the Eastern Front: Culture, Politics and Everyday Life in Central and Eastern Europe from Stalin to Present (SEES0144)

Western observers have primarily looked upon post-war Eastern Europe as the homeland of crisis: a region where history favours the dramatic props of show trials, tank divisions, and ethnic cleansing. Eastern Europeans, however, lived far more often in between such events. These periods of 'normalcy' could of course be bleak (encouraging idealization of the excitement of Western consumer culture) but also created their own particular possibilities for action and interaction. This module will explore how everyday life in Eastern Europe — simultaneously boredom and threat, shelter and surprise — could inspire powerful forms of cultural expression.

 

The module is organized around dates that sound obscure: years or periods in which social change seemed distant rather than imminent, moments anchored in everydayness rather than buffeted by upheaval. These 'snapshot moments' may be less familiar from the history books, but they are more representative of broader social patterns. In each case that pattern shall be approached through analysis either of a significant work of literary, visual or cinematic art, or through popular culture produced at that time, allowing exploration of how cultural expression works through both rejection and exemplification of social norms. Further, for each moment a different country serves as a point of focus that may be contrasted and compared to events elsewhere: the region as a whole thus appears more complex, being characterized by both simultaneity and dissimilarity. In every case, however, special attention will be paid to the ways people have turned banal realities into sources of creativity, and to how these historical 'grey spots' might change our broader image of developments in post-war Eastern Europe.