Critical Theories on Race and Racism
Semester: Spring 2010
Course Code: SOC394K (46590)
Time: Mondays 6-9pm
Place: Burdine 214
Instructor: Dr. Ben Carrington
Phone: 512 232 6341
Email: bcarrington@austin.utexas.edu
Office hours: Burdine 570, Tuesday 2-4pm
Course introduction
This course introduces students to global perspectives on race, ethnicity and racism.
Through a series of close readings of key texts the course examines the historical
relationship between the emergence of ideas about race and Western modernity. The
course is divided into two parts.
Part I examines the importance of slavery and European colonialism in producing
modern understandings of race and racial difference. We look at how the social sciences
themselves have been implicated in the production of racialized ways of seeing and
knowing both the (Western) Self and the (abject) Other: the “West” and “the Rest” as it is
sometimes put. Part I concludes by examining the interrelationships between race,
gender, sexuality and nation in the colonial setting.
Part II examines contemporary racial formation in the period after the anti-colonial
struggles of the mid-20th century. Key here are the ways in which critical social theorists
have sought to understand both the continuities and discontinuities of colonial regimes in
structuring Western societies. Part II thus focuses on questions of State formation, antiracist political struggle, and the politics of identity in relation to questions of ethnicity.
An important aspect of this course is its focus on the global dimensions and
manifestations of racism and ethnicity. Although historical and contemporary debates
concerning the articulation of race and the ethnicity within the U.S. remain central to
many of the readings and class discussions, the course aims to provide a broader,
contextual understanding of the changing nature of race and ethnicity across both time
and geography. While W.E.B. Du Bois famously observed that the key issue of the 20th
century would be the problem of “the color line”, the course ends by discussing the extent
to which race, ethnicity and racism still matter, both sociologically and politically, in the
21st century. The course will be relevant to those students with an interest in critical
theories of race and ethnicity and contemporary social theory.
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Week by week outline
Below is an outline of each week’s reading. The required reading must be completed
before the session as each book will form the basis for the seminar discussion.
Supplementary reading is intended to indicate the key texts with which students should
become familiar. As we are covering a lot of ground, conceptually, historically, and in
disciplinary terms, it is impossible to map all areas of the debates that we engage with.
The supplementary reading should be seen as a “sign post” for further reading should you
develop an interest in that particular topic. These readings are normally made up of five
or six “key texts” in that area, two or three texts that critically summarize the arguments
of others, and sometimes a text by a sociology or UT faculty member whose work
engages and extends with the primary literature.
Part I
Philosophical and Historical Foundations of Race:
Slavery, colonialism and making of “the West” and “the Rest”
Week 1: Monday 18th January
As week one falls on Martin Luther King Jr Day there will be no class. Instead I want you to read
and prepare a two page summary to be handed in at the start of the week 2 on each of the three
required readings below. The readings will allow us to explore the origins of modern ideas about
“race” and its links to European colonialism as well as how race interrelates with questions of
gender, sexuality, class, nation, ethnicity and immigration.
Required Readings:
(1) “Chapter 1: The origin of the concept of race”, pp. 41-97, in Montagu, A. (1997, 6th ed) Man’s
Most Dangerous Myth: The fallacy of race (Altamira Press).
(2) “Ch. 2 Colonialism; Ch. 3 Imperialism; Ch. 4 Neocolonialism; Ch. 5 Postcolonialism”, pp.
15-69” in Young, R. (2001) Postcolonialism: An historical introduction (Blackwell).
(3) “Ch 1 Immigration, Race, Ethnicity, Colonialism”, pp. 1-28, in Spickard, P. (2007). Almost
All Aliens: Immigration, race, and colonialism in American history and identity (Routledge).
Supplementary reading:
Babbitt, S. and Campbell, S. (eds.) (1999) Racism and Philosophy (Cornell University Press)
Back, L. and Solomos, J. (2009, 2nd ed.) “Introduction: Theorising race and racism”, pp. 1-30, in
Back, L. and Solomos, J. Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (Routledge).
Cox, O. (1948[2000]) Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (Monthly Review Press).
Firmin, A. (1885[2002) The Equality of the Human Races (University of Illinois Press).
Gould, S. (1997, 2nd ed.) The Mismeasure of Man (Penguin Books).
Lott, T. (1999) The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation
(Blackwell).
Malik, K. (1996) The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society
(Palgrave/Macmillan).
Taylor, P. (2004) Race: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity Press).
Week 2: Monday 25th January
This session introduces students to the content of the course and defines the expectations. We
will then briefly discuss the three readings from last week and I will collect everyone’s two page
summaries of each reading. We will then discuss the first book: Fredrikson’s historical overview
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of the foundations of modern racism, the links between anti-Semitism and anti-black racism, and
how racism has changed throughout the centuries from the trans-Atlantic slave trade through to
the present. Each student also needs to bring to class a two page critical summary of the
Fredrikson text. I will read over and comment on these summaries and give back the following
week.
Required Reading: Fredrikson, G. (2003) Racism: A Short History (Princeton University Press).
Supplementary reading:
Blackburn, R. (1988) The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (Verso).
Blackburn, R. (1998) The Making of New World Slavery, 1492-1800 (Verso).
Campbell, R. (1989) An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas (LSU Press).
Davis, David B. (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
(Oxford University Press).
Hartman, S. (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-making in Nineteenth Century
America (Oxford University Press).
James, C.L.R. (1938[1989]) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution (Allison and Busby).
Linebaugh, P. and Rediker, M. (2000) The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the
Revolutionary Atlantic (Verso).
Thomas, H. (1998) The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870
(PaperMac).
Williams, E. (1944[1994]) Capitalism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press).
Walvin, J. (1996) Questioning Slavery (Routledge).
Week 3: Monday 1st February
This session examines how Eurocentric frameworks have structured our understandings of history
and geography and how the social sciences, including sociology, have produced forms of white
(European) supremacy and the “myth” of the European miracle.
Required Reading: Blaut, J., M. (1993) The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical
Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (The Guilford Press).
Supplementary reading:
Abu-Lughod, J. (1989) Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350
(Oxford University Press).
Bernal, M. (2001) Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to his Critics (Duke
University Press).
Goldstone, J. (2008) Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History, 1500-1850 ( Hill
Higher Education).
Hall, S. (1996) “Ch. 6 The West and the Rest: Discourse and power”, in Hall, S., Held, D.,
Hubert, D., Thompson, K. (eds.) Modernity: An Introduction to Moderns Societies (Blackwell).
Hesse, B. (2007) ‘Racialized Modernity: An analytics of white mythologies’, in Ethnic and
Racial Studies (30(4), July).
Young, R. (2004) White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (Routledge).
Young, R. (1994) “Ch. 4: Egypt in America: Black Athena, racism and colonial discourse”, in
Rattansi, A. and Westwood, S. (eds.) Racism, Modernity and Identity: On the Western Front
(Polity Press).
Week 4: Monday 8th February
This session looks at the relationship between European colonialism, humanism and the
construction of (black) racial subjectivity. We look at the work of key “anti-colonial” theorists
and their attempt to situate questions of racism in relation to twin processes of European
colonialism and capitalism. Essay titles for the first assignment will be given out in class.
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Required Readings: Cesaire, A. (2000) Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press) and
Fanon, F. (1952[2008]) Black Skin, White Masks (Grove Press).
Supplementary reading:
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903[1990]) The Souls of Black Folk (Vintage Books).
Fanon, F. (1961[1990]) The Wretched of the Earth (Penguin).
James, C.L.R. (1995[1969]) A History of Pan-African Revolt (Charles H. Kerr).
James, C.L.R. (1980[1938]) The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution (Allison and Busby).
Memmi, A. (1982[2000]) Racism (University of Minnesota Press).
Sartre, J-P. (1964[2004]) Colonialism and Neocolonialism (Routledge).
Week 5: Monday 15th February
This session examines how discourse, power and the cultural apparatus of European empires
produced the idea “the West” and the “Oriental Other”. We examine one of the foundational
texts for what is now often termed “postcolonial theory”.
Required Reading: Said, E. (1978 [2003]) Orientalism (Penguin Books).
Supplementary reading:
Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture (Routledge).
Charrad, M. (2001) States and Women’s Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and
Morocco (University of California Press).
Hall, S. (1996) “When was ‘the post-colonial’ Thinking at the limit?”, in Chambers, I. and Curti,
L. (eds.) The Post-colonial Question (Routledge).
Loomba, A. (2005, 2nd ed.) Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Routledge).
Olson, G. and Worsham, L. (eds.) (1999) Race, Rhetoric and the Postcolonial (SUNY Press).
Quayson, A. (2000) Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Polity Press).
Said, E (1993) Culture and Imperialism (Verso).
Spivak, G. (1999) A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
Present (Harvard University Press).
Young, R. (2001) Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell).
Week 6: Monday 22nd February
This session introduces questions of gender and sexuality into the colonial frame. We begin to
problematize the class/race framework by discussing how notions of gendered difference and the
related fears concerning the governance of sexuality became interrelated with questions of race
and racial difference from the 18th century to the present.
Required Reading: McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Contest (Routledge).
Supplementary reading:
González-López, G. (2005) Erotic Journeys: Mexican Immigrants and Their Sex Lives
(University of California Press).
Hoad, N. (2007) African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (University of
Minnesota Press).
Nagel, J. (2003) Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers
(Oxford University Press).
Stoler, A. (1997) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the
Colonial Order of Things (Duke University Press).
Ware, V. (1992) Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (Verso).
Young, R. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (Routledge).
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Week 7: Monday 1st March
Essay preparation and tutorials: Students discuss their draft essays with Course Leader (that
means me) during class time and/or office hours.
Week 8: Monday 8th March
Students hand in final 10 page version to Sociology Departmental Office by 2pm.
Spring Break
Part II
Theorizing Contemporary Post-Colonial Racial Formations:
Politics, the State and post-racial theory
Week 9: Monday 22nd March
This session looks at the concepts of “racial formation” and “racialization” and the role of the
State within critical race theory.
Required Reading: Omi, M. and Winant, H. (1994, 2nd ed.) Racial Formation in the United
States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (Routledge).
Supplementary reading:
Balibar, E. and Wallerstein, I. (1991) Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (Verso)
Gilroy, P. (2002, 2nd ed.) “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of
Race and Nation (Routledge).
Goldberg, D. (2002) The Racial State (Blackwell).
Goldberg, D. (2009) The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (Wiley-Blackwell).
Hall, S. (1980[1996]) “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance” in Baker, H.,
Diawara, M. and Lindeborg, R. (eds.) Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader (The
University of Chicago Press).
Winant, H. (1994) “Ch. 9: Racial Formation and Hegemony: Global and local developments”, in
Rattansi, A. and Westwood, S. (eds.) Racism, Modernity and Identity: On the Western Front
(Polity Press).
Murji, K. and Solomos, J. (eds.) (2004) Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice. Oxford
University Press.
Week 10: Monday 29th March
This session examines the contribution of black feminist thought and transnational feminism to
our understandings of contemporary forms of racism. Essays returned and final essay titles given
out.
Required Reading: Collins, P., H. (1998) Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for
Justice (University of Minnesota Press).
Supplementary reading:
Alexander, J. (2005) Pedagogies of Crossing: Mediations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory,
and the Sacred (Duke University Press).
Anzaldúa, G. (1999) Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books).
Collins, P. (2000, 2nd ed.) Black Feminist Thought (Routledge).
hooks, b. (1991) Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (South End Press).
hooks, b. (2000, 2nd ed.) Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Pluto Press).
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Mohanty, C. (2003) Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
(Duke University Press).
Week 11: Monday 5th April
This session examines the arguments put forward by some radical scholars concerning the need
for a “post-racial” account of racism. Given the argument that racism “produces” race itself,
some thinkers have argued that social scientists need to abandon “race” as an analytical category
altogether. We discuss the merits and limits of this theoretical move.
Required Reading: Gilroy, P. (2004, 2nd ed.) Against Race: Nations, Culture and the Allure of
Race (Routledge).
Supplementary reading:
Darder, A. and Torres, R. (2004) After Race: Racism and Multiculturalism (New York
University Press).
Eze, E. (2001) Achieving our Humanity: The Idea of the Postracial Future (Routledge).
Miles, R.. (1993) Racism After “Race Relations” (Routledge).
Roediger, D. (2002) Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (University of California
Press).
Winant, H. (2004) The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice (University of
Minnesota Press).
Week 12: Monday 12th April
This session focuses on questions of ethnicity. How are we to locate ethnicity in relation to race
(and class, gender, sexuality and nation) and to what extent are claims to ethnic identity political?
Required Reading: Jenkins, R. (2008, 2nd ed.) Rethinking Ethnicity: Arguments and
Explorations (Sage).
Supplementary reading:
Banks, M. (1996) Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions (Routledge).
Brubaker, T. (2004) Ethnicity Without Groups (Harvard University).
Fenton, S. (1999) Ethnicity: Racism, Class and Culture (Palgrave/Macmillan).
Fenton, S. (2003) Ethnicity (Polity Press).
Hall, S. (1996) “Ch. 18 The Question of Cultural Identity”, in Hall, S., Held, D., Hubert, D.,
Thompson, K. (eds.) Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (Blackwell).
Rattansi, A. (1994) “Ch. 1: ‘Western’ Racisms, Ethnicities and Identities in a ‘Postmodern’
Frame”, in Rattansi, A. and Westwood, S. (eds.) Racism, Modernity and Identity: On the
Western Front (Polity Press).
Rudrappa, S. (2004) Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures
of Citizenship (Rutgers University Press).
Week 13: Monday 19th April
Essay preparation: Use this time to research relevant materials for your final essay.
Week 14: Monday 26th April
This session looks at contemporary scholarship, both theoretical and empirical, on race and
racism in the US. We also examine the ASA statement on race and consider how what we have
learnt and discussed during the course will impact our own thinking and future research as
regards critical work on race, ethnicity and racism. We also consider some of the methodological
implications of studying race/racism.
Required Readings: Bonilla-Silva, E. (2010, 3rd ed.) Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind
Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Rowman and Littlefield)
and the ASA Race Statement 2003 – and course summary/evaluation
Supplementary reading:
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Alexander, C. (ed.) (2006) Special Issue: Writing race: Ethnography and difference, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 29(3).
Brown, M. et al (2003) White Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society (University of
California Press)
Bulmer, M. and Solomos, J. (eds.) (2004) Researching Race and Racism (Routledge).
Feagin, J. (2006) Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (Routledge).
Feagin, J. (2010, 2nd ed.) Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations
(Routledge).
Gunaratnam, Y. (2003) Researching “Race” and Ethnicity: Methods, Knowledge and Power
(Sage).
Twine, F. and Warren, J. (eds.) (2000) Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological
Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies (New York University Press).
Wellman, D. (1993, 2nd ed.) Portraits of White Racism (Cambridge University Press).
Zuberi, T. and Bonilla-Silva, E. (eds.) (2008) White Logic, White Methods: Racism and
Methodology (Rowan and Littlefield).
Week 15: Monday 3rd May
Office hours and final essay tutorials.
Week 15 Students hand in final 15 page essay to Sociology Departmental Office by 2pm on
Friday 7th May.
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Grading Policy: The assessment for this course will be two written papers:
1) 10 page essay handed in on Monday of Week 8 (worth 40% of the final grade)
2) 15 page essay submitted in the final week, on Friday 7th May (worth 60%).
The essay questions will be related to the class discussions and reading material.
Web Resources: There are now numerous websites related to the critical study of race
and ethnicity. Four useful ones, that feature a number of the authors we will be reading,
that you should try to consult regularly are:
http://www.threatofrace.org/
http://www.racismreview.com/
http://www.theroot.com/
http://www.darkmatter101.org/
Course Readers: Although there is no substitute for reading the key authors “in the
original”, there are now a number of useful readers that are worth consulting/purchasing
as they can fill in some of the “gaps” that even a comprehensive course such as this
cannot cover. Indeed you will find most of the supplementary readings within these
readers. We recommend the following:
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H. (2006, 2nd ed.) The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader (Routledge).
Back, L. and Solomos, J. (2010, 2nd ed.) Theories of Race and Racism: A reader
(Routledge).
Bulmer, M. and Solomos, J. (1999) Racism (Oxford University Press).
Essed, P. and Goldberg, D. (2002) Race Critical Theories (Blackwell).
Lemert, C. (2004, 3rd ed.) Social Theory: The multicultural and classic readings
(Westview Pres).
Finally, you should familiarize yourself with the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies. This
carries leading-edge research in the area and you should regularly consult this journal to
inform your readings.
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