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'Race', Empire, Postcoloniality

Overview

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

Module description

This transdisciplinary module stretches across the social sciences and arts and humanities. It focuses on transcontinental histories and legacies of colonisation framed by contemporary discussions on new wars, ultranationalisms and internationalisms and ecological devastation. We will examine debates on:

  • early modern histories of conquest, the beginnings of global racial capitalism, forms of colonial labour such as slavery, indenture and convict labour, new inventions of race, nature and land
  • further colonial expansion, ecological extraction and wealth cultivation, the development of academic disciplines across 'the age of Enlightenment', new formations of race, humanity and subhumanity
  • colonial cultures, nationalisms, class, respectability, the further development of interconnected colonial systems of categorisation such as race, tribe, sex and sexuality, histories of anticolonial resistance
  • intertwined histories of colonisation, genocide and ecological destruction, eugenics, the Shoah, the further development of academic disciplines
  • contemporary theories of race and ethnicity and histories of anticolonial, antifascist and antiracist resistance in the UK
  • identity and the postcolonial legacies of colonial systems of categorisation
  • psychopolitical theories of racialised subjectification, contemporary histories of state and corporate negligence and violence, justice, reparation and freedom
  • the ethics and potential political contradictions of this transdisciplinary body of work.