Syllabus
The full course syllabus will be available at the first meeting. Sessions will consist of lectures and student led discussions, and course requirements include leading the discussion, short response papers and a term paper. At this point we envision in-class teaching, and possibly some ‘walkshops.’ Students are asked to bring masks to class.
In week 5 we will have a guest lecture by prof Gabrielle Ivinson on Devising arts-based methods to enable the affective traces of intergenerational trauma to be expressed.
Themes include: Colonial histories and white innocence; the slippery category of race; racialised embodiment and difference; disposable lives; racial melancholia; critical fabulation; decolonizing methodlogies; transracialism, diversity policies, intersectionality, and more. recommended literature
Alcoff, Linda M (2015) The Future of Whiteness. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Koobak, Redi and Madina Tlostanova (2021) Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges. London: Routledge.
Eng, David L and Shinhee Han (2019 Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation, Durham: Duke University.
Nash, Jennifer (2019) Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Annotation
This course introduces students to critical studies of race, racism and racial politics, their rich genealogies in feminist theory and activism, and their continued urgency, particularly in Europe. What exactly does it mean to say that race is ‘socially constructed’ or that it needs to be ‘re-ontologised’? Is race 'fluid'? How do race and gender inevitably intersect in historically specific ways? What are apparatuses (including research methodologies) through which race gets reiteratively produced and made absent? And how are ‘we’ implicated in such racial productions?
Through engaging case studies and feminist debates, the course examines the ruptures and continuities of racial formations, antisemitism, post/colonialisms, and racialized embodiments. The aim is to develop critical thinking, reading and research strategies for addressing processes of racialisation in a geopolitical context where the importance of race is routinely denied. We will also look at feminist and anti- racist organising, utopias, and debates about the limits of multiculturalism, and bio- and necropolitics.