13177b

SoSe 20: Racism and Whiteness in the Long 20th Century

Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu

Hinweise für Studierende

Due to the rapid spread of the coronavirus and in line with university policies, the seminar will move to an online course that will involve mostly asynchronous teaching in combination with a few synchronous meetings online. Schließen

Zusätzl. Angaben / Voraussetzungen

Students are required to: • closely study the weekly readings (self-paced) • write short papers responding to assigned readings (clustered responses to the readings of the previous three weeks to be submitted every three weeks on Blackboard) • attend at least two out of four synchronous online meetings between 3-3.45pm (exact dates to be announced later) • write a final paper based on secondary literature (total word count: 5000 words; students who decide to write the final paper will be encouraged to have one individual meeting online with the instructor). The first synchronous meeting will take place on April 27, 3-3.45pm in the form of a welcome meeting on Webex during which I will introduce myself, run you through the topics that we will be discussing throughout the seminar, and introduce the syllabus. Schließen

Kommentar

Few concepts have such a long, turbulent and multifaceted history of discursive transformation, political implementation and activism against them as race and racism. Despite–or perhaps thanks to–being so elusive and contested, race and racism as ideology and set of practices were powerful tools in shaping the reality of cultures, societies, states, and historical agents on the ground. The goal of this course is to explore the emergence, transformation and contestation of racism as a discourse through the lens of a selected set of topics such as: race/racism and science; race/racism and the state; race/racism and violence; race/racism and mobility; race/racism and socialism; race/racism and gender/sexuality; race/racism and the city; race/racism and resistance; race/racism and Whiteness. Bringing together micro-historical analysis, intellectual and political history, and Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, the seminar will examine key dimensions of the shifting meanings and practices around the notions of race (e.g. from culture to biology and back), ethnicity, identity, migration, antisemitism, Blackness, and Whiteness as complicity. One of the overarching aims of the seminar is to unpack entrenched notions of what counts as racism. Students will read and work with various materials such as movies, ego-documents, secondary literature and archival material that forged and distilled racist fantasies, ideologies and practices, and chronicled the suffering and resistance to racism. By the end of the seminar students will gain critical appreciation of the history of racism and current debates around it. Schließen