Winter 2005
History 27400/37400.
Race & Racism in the Americas
TTH 12:00—1:20
Rosenwald 11
Tom Holt
702-8389
tholt@uchicago.edu
TA’s: Allyson Hobbs
ahobbs@uchicago.edu
Elizabeth Cooper
encooper@uchicago.edu
Office Hours: Tuesdays 3:30-5
SS213
This is a lecture course examining selected topics in the development
of racism with the goal of better understanding the complex ways in
which race has functioned in the modern world. I will draw on both
cross-national perspectives (US, Latin America, and Europe) and from
the experiences of diverse groups (African-Americans, Asian-Americans,
Mexican-Americans, and Native-Americans). Beginning with the premise
that people of color in the Americas have both a common history of
dispossession, discrimination, and oppression as well as strikingly
different historical experiences, I will use those commonalities and
differences to probe a number of assumptions and theories about race
and racism in both academic and popular thought. Of particular
interest will be the conceptually and experientially “marginal”
situations, such as those involving race-mixing and cross-racial
performances, where the fundamental premises and hidden contradictions
of racial thinking are most exposed.
Requirements
Course requirements include class attendance and participation in
discussions, including web-based exchanges (20%); three short, on-line
quizzes of which one will figure into the course grade (10%); a midterm
essay and a final essay (at least 5 but no more than 10 double-spaced
pages each; these account for 30% and 40% of the course grade,
respectively). All written assignments must be submitted via the Chalk
website. All assignments must be completed by the deadlines specified.
Late work will receive an automatic grade reduction e.g., B+ to B).
Further details on these assignments and grading policy will be posted
as needed to the “Assignments” section of the Chalk website
(https://chalk.uchicago.edu).
Readings (italicized texts available for purchase in the Seminary Coop;
starred items on E-Reserve or course website, “Documents”):
Forum: “Amalgamation and the Historical Distinctiveness of the United
States,” American Historical Review, 108 (Dec. 2003): 1362-1414.
*Arnesen, Eric. “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,”
International Labor and Working-Class History no. 60 (Fall 2001): 3-32.
*Aubert, Guillaume, “’The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in
the French Atlantic World,” William & Mary Quarterly, LXI, no. 3 (July
2004):439-478.
*Bamshad, Michael J. and Steve E. Olson, “Does Race Exist?” Scientific
American 78 (Dec 2003): 78-85.
*Barrett, James and David Roediger, “The Inbetween People: Race,
Nationality, and the New Immigrant Working Class,” JAH ():
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*Bodian, Miriam. “’Men of the Nation’: The Shaping of Converso Identity
in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present, no. 143 (May 1994): 49-76.
Brown, Kathleen. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs:
Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (UNC, 1996).
*Brubaker, Rogers and Frederick Cooper. "Beyond Identity." Theory and
Society 29, no. February (2000): 1--47.
*Camiscioli, Elisa. “Producing Citizens, Reproducing the ‘French Race’:
Immigration, Demography, and Pronatalism in Early 20th century France,”
Gender and History, vol. 13, no. 3 (Fall 2001).
Daniel, G. Reginald. More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New
Racial Order (Temple, 2002).
Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian (Yale, 1998).
*Fry, Peter. “Politics, Nationality, and the Meanings of ‘Race’ in
Brazil,” Daedalus 129, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 83—118.
Gilmore, Glenda E. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White
Supremacy (North Carolina, 1996).
*Gross, Ariela. "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination
in the Nineteenth-Century South." Yale Law Journal 108, no. June
(1998): 109--88.
*Hanchard, Michael. “Black Cinderella?: Race and the Public Sphere in
Brazil.” In The Black Public Sphere, 169-189.
Holt, Thomas C. The Problem of Race in the 21st Century (Harvard, 2000).
*Hughes, Langston. “Who’s Passing for Who?” in Laughing to Keep
from Crying.
*Johnson, Walter. “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics
of Racial Determination in the 1850s,” Journal of American History 87,
no. 1 ():
Kennedy, Randall. Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and
Adoption (Pantheon, 2003)
*Knight, Alan. “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 19101940,” in The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870—1940 ed., Richard
Graham, (Austin: U of Texas Press, 1990): 71—113.
*McLean, Nancy. “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered: Gender and Sexual
Politics in the Making of Reactionary Populism.” Journal of American
History, (Dec. 1991): 917-48.
*Martínez, María Elena, “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de
Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico,”
William & Mary Quarterly, LXI, no. 3 (July 2004): 479-520.
*Mitchell, Mary Niall. "Rosebloom and Pure White, or So It Seemed."
American Quarterly 54, no. no. 3, September (2002).
Perez, Louis A., Jr., “Between Baseball and Bullfighting: The Quest for
Nationality in Cuba,” Journal of American History 81 (Sept. 1994): 493517.
Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working Class (Verso, rev. ed. 1999), chap. 6.
*Rogin, Michael. “Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds
His Voice,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Spring 1992): 417-53.
*Rouse, Roger. “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of
Postmodernism,” Diaspora 1 (Spring 1991): 8-23.
Sanchez, George. Becoming Mexican American, chap. 8.
*Solange Alberro, “Beatriz de Padilla, Mulatta Mistress and Mother,” in
Kenneth Mills and William B. Taylor, eds., Colonial Spanish America: A
Documentary History. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1998.
Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen. Knopf, 1947.
Vasconcelos, José. The Cosmic Race: A Bilingual Edition (Hopkins,
1997).
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Schedule of Classes and Assignments
1st Week—Race as a Problem in Social-Historical Analysis
Reading: Holt, Problem of Race, 3-24; Bamshad and Olson, “Does Race
Exist?,”; *Langston Hughes, “Who’s Passing for Who?”
Supplementary: Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond Identity”; Sewell, William
H., Jr. “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, eds.
Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (California, 1999); Ricardo Ventura
Santos and Marcos Chor Maio, “Race, Genomics, Identities and Politics
in Contemporary Brazil,” Critique of Anthropology 24, no. 4 (2004):
347-378.
Jan 4—Introductions
Jan 6—Unraveling Race as a Category of Historical Analysis, or What do
we think we know? (Exploring the relations among race, biology, and
culture, historically and in contemporary thought.)
2nd Week—Origins of Race and Racism, Temporal and Causal
Readings: Martinez, “The Black Blood of New Spain”; Guillaume, “’The
Blood of France,’”; in William & Mary Quarterly Forum; Bodian, “’Men of
the Nation’”; Solange, “Beatriz de Padilla.”
Jan 11—Spain and the Jewish Question: When is “Race” Race?
(Historical origins of the race concept.)
Jan 13—First Open Discussion Session: Exploring Some Foundational
Concepts--Race, Identity, Biology, and Culture.
3rd Week—Race and Slavery
Readings: Brown, Good Wives, 107—244; Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen,
41-128.
Supplementary: Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, chaps. 4
and 5.
Jan 18-Race in a Baroque Idiom: Living with Difference in the New World
(How New World conditions transformed the meanings and practices of
race; how race evolved as one of many competing forms of identity.]
Jan 20-Making Slavery, Making Race: A Comparative Perspective
(The evolution of slavery and race relations in the Atlantic World.)
Friday, Jan. 21: First On-line Quiz
4th Week—Race, Gender and Class
Readings: Barrett and Roediger, “Inbetween People”; Arnesen, “Whiteness
and the Historians’ Imagination”; Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, chaps.
3-4; McLean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered.”
Jan 25—“Whiteness”: Marking the Unmarked Self
(Interrogating the idea of “whiteness.” How race and class are
mutually constitutive.)
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Jan 27—“Blackness”: Manhood, Womanhood, and the Incubus Within
(Exploring the meanings and functions of “blackness.” Evaluating
competing paradigms for explaining racism.)
5th Week—Racialized Spaces: Race-making and Nation-making
Readings: Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, 3-45; Camiscioli, “Producing
Citizens, Reproducing the ‘French Race’; Knight, “Racism, Revolution,
and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940.”
Feb 1—Of Miscegenation and Mestizaje: From Gobineau to “the Cosmic
Race”
(Race relations are generally thought of in terms of hostility and
aversion, but almost from the beginning there has been a contrary
notion that valorized racial mixture.)
Feb 3— Race and the Nation: Cuba, France, Brazil, and the US
(Compares four cases in which race-mixture has been integral to
imagining/making the nation.)
6th Week—Intermediate Spaces
Readings: Perez, “Between Baseball and Bullfighting”; Rouse, “Mexican
Migration”; Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American, chap. 8.
Supplementary: Richard White, Middle Ground, ix-141; David Montejano,
Anglos and Mexicans, chaps. 1-2, 4-5, 7.
Feb 8—Borders, Boundaries, and Middle Grounds
(While concepts of racial and cultural difference depend upon imagined
separate spaces marked off by imagined boundaries and with discernible
borders, human existence in the modern world depends on transgressing
borderlines and the negotiation of “middle grounds. How do we think
about racial and cultural distinctiveness under those conditions.)
Feb 10—Second Open Discussion Session
Midterm Essay due by 4PM Friday, Feb. 11th.
7th Week—Performing Race
Readings: Gross, "Litigating Whiteness”; Mitchell, “Rosebloom and Pure
White;” Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies, 281—366; Johnson, “The Slave
Trade, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the
1850s.”
Supplementary: Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul.
“Miscegenation and the Law,” JAH
Peggy Pascoe,
Feb 15—Recognizing Race: The Problem of Racial Identification in
American Law and Society
(How does one determine “race” when the biological and cultural clues
are ambiguous?)
Feb 17—Performing Race: Passing (by Allyson Hobbs)
(Stripped of its biological markers, “race” becomes performance.
what are its consequences?)
But
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Friday, Feb. 18: Second Short Quiz
8th Week— Challenging Racial Categories: Heterogeneity and Hybridity
Readings: Deloria, Playing Indian, chaps. 3-4; Roediger, The Wages of
Whiteness, chap. 6; Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise”; Hanchard, “Black
Cinderella?: Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil.”
Supplementary: Lisa Lowe, “Heterogenity, Hybridity, Multiplicity:
Marking Asian American Differences,” Diaspora 1 (Spring 1991): 24-44.
(also in Immigrant Acts, 60-83); Michael Rogin, “Making America Home:
Racial Masquerade and Ethnic Assimilation in the Transition to Talking
Pictures,” Journal of American History, 79 (Dec 1992): 1050-1077.
Feb 22-- Performing Race: the Politics of Authenticity (by Allyson
Hobbs)
(The ways in which white folks also “pass.”)
Feb 24—Performing Race to a Samba Beat (by Beth Cooper)
(An alternative experience with racial mixture and racial performance:
Brazil.)
9th Week—Challenging Racial Categories: The Politics of Mixed Race
Readings: Daniel, More Than Black?, chaps. 5-8; AHR Forum:
“Amalgamation and the Historical Distinctiveness of the United States.”
Supplementary: Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies, 214-280.
Mar 1— Am I That Name?: Neither Black nor White
(Race can be a form of knowledge as well as a source of mystification.
What happens, then, when mixed-race peoples assert the legitimacy of
their hybrid identities?)
Mar 3—Third Open Discussion Session.
10th Week—The Future of Race
Readings: Holt, Problem of Race, 59-123; Kennedy, Interracial
Intimacies, 367-521; Fry, “Politics, Nationality, and the Meaning of
‘Race’ in Brazil.”
Supplementary: Bring Them Home.
Monday, Mar. 7: Third Short Quiz
Mar 8—Between Color Blindness and Color Struck: Struggling Against Race
Without Becoming Racialized
(Does racism depend upon racial identity? The seeming paradox between
the “need” for racial identity and movements to eliminate racism.)
Final Papers Due by midnight, Friday, March 11th via Chalk website.