Poli 445A/ 523B: Critical Theory –
Political Theory and the Problem of “Race”
Fall 2009
Prof.: Bruce Baum
Office: Buchanan C412
Phone: 822-2490
email: bbaum@politics.ubc.ca
Time: Tues, 2-5 pm
Office Hrs:
Tues., 1-3 pm; F, 12:30-1:50
& by apt.
Critical Theory examines ways in which prevailing conceptions of social and political life
perpetuate relations of domination, oppression, and injustice. Following Marx, Critical
Theorists of the early Frankfurt School focused on question of class division, political
economy, and ideology. More recently, Critical Theory has expanded its purview to
address injustices rooted in prevailing conceptions and practices of gender, sexuality,
racialization and racism, nationalism, and other topics.
This course will focus on the politics of “race,” racism, and racialization. The
construction, perpetuation, and transformation of “racial” (or racialized) identities has
long been a central feature of modern politics. Critical theorists of “race” maintain that
the significance of “race” is not to be found in our biology, or our DNA, but in the social
and political processes through which “race” and racialized social identities and
inequalities are constructed, perpetuated and contested. The field of critical “race” theory
(or critical “race” studies) is highly interdisciplinary, but we will explore critical
approaches to the politics of “race” chiefly through works contemporary political theory.
I. Texts:
K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race
(Princeton University Press, 1996)
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 1952)
Grove Press, 1967; Reissue edition, 1991
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended” (Picador, December 2003
Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts
(The MIT Press, 1995).
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1999)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (Schocken; Reissue edition, April 1995)
Linda Martin Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, And The Self
(Oxford University Press, 2005)
Additional readings (in a course reading packet, CRP, available in the bookstore, except
where noted):
Lucius Outlaw, “Lifeworlds, Modernity, and Political Praxis: Race, Ethnicity and Critical
Social Theory.”
Bruce Baum, “Before the ‘Caucasian Race’: Antecedents of European Racialism, c.
1000-1684” (from Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race A Political History of
Racial Identity, NYU Press, ch. 1).
George Elliott Clarke, “White Like Canada”
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Étienne Balibar, “Is There a `Neo-Racism'?,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel
Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1992)
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Black Orpheus”
Lisa Lowe, “Work, Gender, Immigration: Asian ‘American’ Women”
Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a
‘Postsocialist’ Age.” On reserve in Koerner in Fraser, Justice Interruptus. (An
earlier version is available online at: http://newleftreview.org/?view=1810.)
Some other works worth knowing about that we will not read:
Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Fathers’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture
(Oxford, 1992)
Hannah Arendt, “Anti-Semitism” and “Imperialism” in Arendt, The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1958)
Michael Banton, Racial theories (Cambridge, 1998)
Les Back and John Solomos, eds., Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (Routledge,
2000),
Lawrence Blum, “I’m Not a Racist But…”: The Moral Quandry of Race (Cornell, 2002)
Hazel Carby, “White Women Listen!,” in The Empire Stikes Back: Race and Racism in
1970s Britain (Routledge, 1982)
Derrick Darby, Rights, Race, and Recognition (Cambridge U Press, 2009)
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935)
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Verso, 1993)
_________, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Harvard,
2000)
Joshua Glasgow, A Theory of Race (Routledge, 2009)
Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness
(Minnesota, 1993)
Jorge J.E. Garcia, ed., Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity (Cornell, 2007)
David Theo Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minnesota, 1990)
David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning
(Blackwell, 1993)
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (Routledge, 1995)
Albert Memmi, Racism, foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah; trans. and with an
introduction by Steve Martinot (Minnesota, 2000).
Robert Miles, Racism (Routledge, 1989)
Eileen O'Brien, The Racial Middle: Latinos and Asian Americans Living Beyond the
Racial Divide (NYU Press, 2008)
Lucius Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (Routledge, 1996)
Ali Rattansi, Racism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2007).
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (Verso, 1991, 1999)
Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard, 1991)
Howard Winant, The World is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy Since World War II
(Basic, 2002). This book provides a succinct overview of what Winant calls
the “modern world racial system” along with comparative analyses of Europe,
Brazil, South Africa, and the US.
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II. Assignments and evaluation:
A. Attendance and class participation: come prepared to share in weekly
discussions. Participation will constitute 20% of your overall course grade. One
or two of you will be assigned at the start of the term to give oral presentations
each week; this will count as part of your overall participation mark. Those of you
who are shy, or who find it difficult to speak in groups, are encouraged to submit
two brief (1/2 page-1 pg, single-spaced) analytical, critical reflection papers
about one key idea or concept in the assigned readings for the week. These short
papers must be submitted at the weekly seminar, on Friday, and both are due by
March 30. (Thus, these short papers must address readings and topics that we
discuss in class between Sept. 12 and November 13.) If you are a steady (as well
as respectful and never overbearing) participant in seminar discussions, you may
skip these critical reflection papers.
B. Two short analytical essays: in about 3-3 1/2 pages, double spaced (roughly
1000-1200 words, no more), you will critically assess one of the key ideas or
concepts (or a couple of closely related ideas or concepts) in one of the
approaches to “race” and racism. (For instance, you could examine one aspect of
Mills’s notion of the “racial contract.”) The first short essay, due on Oct. 9, must
focus on one of the theorists whose work we examine in class from Sept. 18-Oct.
9. The second, due on Nov. 13, must focus on one of the theorists whose work we
examine in class from Oct. 9-Nov. 13. Keep in mind that a critical analysis/
assessment may consist of a defense of a given theoretical perspective. The first
short paper will count for 10% of your overall grade; the second for 20%.
C. Term paper: 12-15 pages, double-spaced, for grad students; 8-10 double-spaced
pages, double-spaced, for undergraduates. The topic is fairly open though limited
to the broad terrain of the seminar. More details will come later, along with the
due date (which will be during the final exam period). This paper will count for
50% of your overall course grade. Due date: Weds., December 16.
III. Topics and readings
Week 1, Sept. 11: Intro
Film: TBA
Week 2, Sept. 18: Historical and conceptual background,
Read:
Winant, “The Modern World Racial System,” In CRP.
Appiah, “Race, Culture, Identity,” in Color Conscious (also reserve in Koerner Libr.)
Paul Taylor, “The challenge of social differentiation” (pp. 52-69), in CRP.
Bruce Baum, “Before the ‘Caucasian Race’: Antecedents of European Racialism, c.
1000-1684,” in CRP.
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(If you have time, you might also read the Introduction to my book, The Rise and Fall of
the Caucasian Race (2006), “‘Caucasians’ and the Political History of Racial Identities,”
which you can access through my Poli Sci Dept. webpage.)
Supplemental:
Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Summer 2000), 821-65.
Week 3, Sept. 25: Western modernity’s “racial contract”
Read:
Mills, The Racial Contract
Supplemental:
Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, “Introduction,” in Pateman and Mills, Contract and
Domination (Polity, 2007), 1-9, in CRP.
Carole Pateman, “Race, Sex, and Indifference,” in Pateman and Mills, Contract and
Domination, 134 -64. On reserve in Koerner Library for Poli 523B, sec. 002.
Week 4, Oct. 2: Fanon on anti-black racism and colonialism, I
Read:
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Intro. & chs. 1-4
Week 5, October 9: Fanon, II
Read:
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, chs. 5-8
Supplemental:
Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” in CRP.
* Sartre’s essay is notable in relation to Fanon’s book as Fanon responds to and qualifies
Sartre’s quasi-Marxist universalism, and both respond to the philosophy of negritude.
* The first short essay is due on Oct. 9. *
Week 6, October 16: French perspectives on anti-Semitism and “neo-racism”:
Sartre and Balibar
Read:
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew
Étienne Balibar, “Uprising in the Banlieues” (2007) in CRP.
Supplemental:
Hannah Arendt, “Antisemitism,” in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt
Brace, 1951).
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Étienne Balibar, “Is There a `Neo-Racism'?”, in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel
Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. of Balibar by Chris
Turner (Verso, 1991). On reserve in Koerner Library for Poli 523B, sec. 002.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 1989).
David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Europeanization,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29, nos. 2,
(March 2006), pp. 331-364.
Week 7, October 23: Critical Theory and the Politics of Recognition, I
Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” in The Dialectic
of Enlightenment (1947), in CRP.
Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, chs. 1-4.
Honneth, “The Social Dynamics of Disrespect: On the Location of Critical Theory
Today,” in CRP.
Note: In a way Honneth’s work is a bit of an outlier among the works that we are
studying: He doesn’t explicitly address “race” and racism. The closest that he comes in
these texts is a passing reference to Jean-Paul Sartre’s engagement with Frantz Fanon’s
influential anti-colonial writings (Struggle, p. 160). That said, Honneth’s work is an
influential attempt within the tradition of Critical Theory to theorize struggles among
social collectives (struggles for recognition) that arguably has much to offer for
theorizing both the construction of racialized identities and racism. Honneth’s account of
intergroup struggles can be contrasted fruitfully with Michel Foucault’s related but
different effort (see Week 9).
Supplemental:
Axel Honneth, “A Society Without Humiliation?” (Review Article), European Journal of
Philosophy 5, nos. 3 (1997).
Melvin L. Rogers. “Rereading Honneth: Exodus Politics and the Paradox of
Recognition,” European Journal of Political Theory, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2009), 183206.
Week 8, October 30: Critical Theory and the Politics of Recognition, II
Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, ch. 5-9.
Lucius Outlaw, “Lifeworlds, Modernity, and Political Praxis: Race, Ethnicity and Critical
Social Theory,” in CRP.
Supplemental:
Nancy Fraser, "Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical 'Race' Theory, and the Politics
of Culture," in The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law,
and Culture, ed. Morris Dickerstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998)
Thomas McCarthy, "Vergangenheitsbewaltigung in the USA: On the Politics and the
Memory of Slavery," Political Theory 30, no. 5 (October 2002), 623-48.
_______________, “Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II: On the Morality and
Politics of Reparations for Slavery,” Political Theory 32, no. 6 (December 2004).
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________________, “Political Philosophy and Racial Injustice,” in Pragmatism,
Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard Bernstein, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser
(Cambridge, MA: The NIT Press, 2004)
________________, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
Lucius Outlaw, "Cultural hermeneutics and racialized life-worlds," Philosophy and
Social Criticism, vol. 24 (April 1998), pp. 101-111.
____________, Critical Social Theory in the Interests of Black Folks (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2005
Week 9, November 6: Foucault’s genealogy of modern racism
Read:
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” lectures 1-7 (pp. 1-166), lectures 10-11 and
Course Summary (pp. 215-272). (If you have time, read lectures 8 & 9.)
Note: The first two lectures are basically Foucault’s well-known and widely published
“Two Lectures.” Here we find them in his larger theoretical inquiry of the time.
Foucault’s overall analysis in these lectures has affinities to post-colonial theory insofar
as he basically suggests that most known (esp. European) societies are products of
conquest rather than of some idealized “social contract” among equals. (In this his
argument also has affinities to that of Mills.) This is so even though he does not directly
confront to legacy of European colonialism (in contrast to Fanon and Mills).
Supplemental:
Beatrice Hanssen, “Power/ Force/ War (On Foucault’s “Society Must Be Defended”), in
Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory
(Routledge, 2000). On reserve in Koerner Library for Poli 523B, sec. 002.
Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and
the Colonial Order of Things (Duke University Press, 1995). On reserve in
Koerner Library.
Week 10, November 13: Race and Gender, I
Read:
Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, And The Self, Intro. & chs. 2, 4, 6 & 7.
* The second short essay is due on November 13. *
Week 11, November 20: Race and Gender, II
Read:
Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, And The Self, chs. 8-12 & Conclusion
Lisa Lowe, “Work, Gender, Immigration: Asian ‘American’ Women,” in CRP.
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Supplemental:
Mary Maynard, “’Race,’ Gender, and the Concept of ‘Difference’ in Feminist Thought.”
On reserve in Koerner Library for Poli 523B, sec. 002.
Hazel Carby, “White Women Listen!,” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in
1970s Britain (Routledge, 1982); also in Black British Cultural Studies.
Week 12, November 27: Critical Theories of Whiteness
Read:
W.E.B. Du Bois, excerpts from Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 1971), ch. 2:
“The White Worker,” and a fragment from ch. 16: “Back Toward Slavery.” In
CRP.
Du Bois (1868-1963), the African American historian, sociologist, and activist, was
arguably one of the great social scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries. He was also
perhaps the first great systematic critical theorist of whiteness. He is probably best
known for his early book The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Black Reconstruction is
informed by Du Bois’s turn to Marxism. The fragment from ch. 16 deals with the
pivotal end of the short-lived post US Civil War Reconstruction era of reform; you can
skim most of this excerpt if you are short on time, but note especially pp., 700-01.
Ruth Frankenberg, “The Mirage of an Unmarked Whiteness,” in CRP.
Charles Mills, “Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness,” in CRP.
David S. Owen, “Toward a Critical Theory of Whiteness” (2007), in CRP.
Supplemental:
George Elliott Clarke, “White Like Canada,” Transition, nos. 72 (1997), in CRP.
Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Week 13, December 4: Elaborations and prescriptions
Read:
Amy Gutmann, “Responding to Racial Injustice,” in Color Conscious.
Nancy Fraser, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a
‘Postsocialist’ Age,” in CRP.
Bhikhu Parekh, “Achieving Racial Equality,” in CRP.
Paul Gilroy, “Race and the Right to Be Human,” in CRP.
Supplemental:
Alberto Melucci, “Difference and Otherness in a Global Society.” On reserve in Koerner
Library for Poli 523B, sec. 001.
Himani Bannerji, “On the Dark Side of the Nation: Politics of Multiculturalism and the
State of ‘Canada,’” in Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation (2000).
Paul Gilroy, “Race ends here.,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21, nos. 5 (1998), 838-847.
* Reminder: The term paper is due on Weds., December 16. *
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