Genealogy of Racism as a Concept: Deconstruction & Governmentality (475-0-20)
Instructors
Herman Barnor Hesse
8474913775
1860 Campus Dr Crowe 5-131
Meeting Info
Kresge Centennial Hall 2-343: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
The aim of this course is to interrogate the histories and logics of race and racism as concepts, beginning with the interrogation of the use of each concept in two different texts. In considering the significance of race and racism as a concepts, it critiques the discursive traditions in which they been traditionally narrated as historically self-evident objects. The course turns attention to the contested social construction of race within the concept of racism, revealing the suppression of the colonial formation of race as a political object of contestation, which in turn facilitates the privileging of race as a natural object of scientific investigation. In exposing race as constituted by a colonial and governmental lineage rather than a biological or ethnic ancestry, the course shifts the conceptual meaning of racism from its contemporary anchorage in ideology and the exception in western sovereignty, to the constitutive logics of convention and regime in contemporary western liberal democracies. Seeking to establish a reformulated concept of race and racism in the material and discursive terms of governance and histories of practices rather than ideology and histories of ideas, the course draws upon historical theoretical method of genealogy.
Learning Objectives
1.Students will be able to theorize the contested concepts of race and racism.
2.Students will understand the significance of genealogy in the conceptual formation of race and racism.
3.Students will be able to distinguish between race as social construction and colonial constitution.
4.Students will be able to analyze the 20th century inception and discourse of the racism concept.
Class Materials (Required)
Recommended Books
George Fredrickson (2015) ‘Racism - A Short History', (Princeton University Press), ISBN 978-0691167053
Patrick Wolfe (2016) ‘Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race', (Verso Books), ISBN 978-78168-917-