Most studies of imperialism focus on the ways in which metropolitan colonizing societies have sought to dominate and rule their colonies; in other words, they define imperialism as a one-way street of cultural and social influence. This course will explore the idea of empire as a process of cultural exchange, attending chiefly to the complex relationship between culture and imperialism that obtained in the European metropolis itself. Focusing chiefly (but not exclusively) on the examples provided by the British and French empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we will ask what impact imperial possession and ongoing European encounters with colonized and non-Western societies had on the development of metropolitan culture in a number of diverse areas, including popular leisure and entertainment, tourism, museums and exhibitions, orientalism and exoticism in art and literature, the construction of "imperial" capital cities, the disciplines of anthropology, ethnology, and the growth of putatively scientific ideologies of race, class and gender. Readings will include works by Edward Said, Hannah Arendt, J.A. Hobson, Bernard Cohn, Gauri Viswanathan, E.M. Forster, and Joseph Conrad. Format: seminar. Evaluation will be based on active participation in class discussion and several papers of medium length. Enrollment limit: 15. Preference given to History majors. Group B