'Race', Empire, Postcoloniality

Overview

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
• Convenor: Dr Yasmeen Narayan
• Assessment: a 4000-word essay (100%)

Module description

This interdisciplinary module stretches across the arts and humanities and social sciences. It explores debates on ‘race’ and racism in relation to histories and legacies of empire framed by new wars, ultranationalisms and internationalisms.

We will examine early modern histories of conquest and the beginnings of global racial capitalism, forms of colonial labour such as slavery, indenture and convict labour and new inventions of race, nature and land. We will then turn to the development of the concept of race and interconnected systems of colonial categorisation such as tribe, sex and sexuality in relation to the histories of academic disciplines during 'the age of Enlightenment', imaginations of distinct human species, ideas of progress and further colonial expansion and extraction. We will discuss colonial cultures, nationalisms, class, respectability, the further development of colonial classification and histories of anticolonial resistance during the nineteenth century. We will then examine the intertwined histories of colonisation and genocide, eugenics, the Shoah, the further development of modern academic disciplines and multidisciplinary racial thought.

We will trace the braided histories of theories of race and ethnicity and anticolonial, antifascist and antiracist resistance. We will examine histories of the concept of identity before exploring the postcolonial legacies of colonial systems of categorisation. We will then discuss psychopolitical approaches to how we become raced subjects or theories of racialised subjectification in relation to histories of state and corporate negligence and violence and the questions on justice, reparation and freedom that they are entwined with. We will conclude the module through exploring debates on the ethics and potential political contradictions of this transdisciplinary body of work.