EN2XX/EN3XX: Race Objects

This module introduces students to the conceptual history of race, attending to critical contributions in the philosophical and scientific literatures that have produced the race concepts shaping the past and today’s world, and to the sites of the body on which race concepts have to congeal and be adjudicated. The first section of the module examines theories of racial origin and categorization from the classical period through the 19th century, exploring how these theories come to interact with one another and take newly consequential forms with the Age of Discovery and the genocidal, colonial and slaving projects that emerge from it. The second examines particular sites on the body, how they come to be associated with particular subcomponents of racial ideology, and how this association creates contradictions and limits that trigger, in various different historical contexts, related kinds of politics of race management.