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SoSe 20: Introduction to History of Racism

Thuc Linh Nguyen Vu

Information for students

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. The seminar will start on April 29. close

Additional information / Pre-requisites

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) • contribute to a glossary of key concepts in the study of racism and its history based on secondary literature (students will be asked to contribute at least one entry of a total word count of 1500 words; students who decide to contribute to the glossary will be encouraged to have one individual meeting online with the instructor). The first synchronous meeting will take place on April 29, 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. close

Comments

What is race? Who is a racist? What do recent terms such as ‘white innocence’ and ‘white fragility’ refer to? Can structures, norms and rules be racist? 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 have been 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, Yellow Peril, 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. close