Race and Critical Theory

Catalog description

As a philosophical approach to culture and society emerging out of European contexts, critical theory has traditionally excluded questions about the history of racial difference. Yet critical theory’s insights into processes of subject formation, social relations, mass culture, and general emancipatory drive continue to inform and be of value to scholars of race concerned with the everyday production and transmission of ideas about normative humanity. At the same time, in their engagement with theory's blindspots, scholars of race demonstrate the racialized histories, contexts, and assumptions that make up that for which "theory" cannot account, as well as that from which it has unquestioningly emerged. This course explores contemporary critical scholarship on race, as defined by its relationship to anti-positivist epistemologies, theories of the subject, critiques of traditional ontology and aesthetics, and engagement with the Black radical tradition, environmental humanities, psychoanalysis, and more. Some familiarity with key figures and ideas in postcolonial theory and Black studies is desirable though not absolutely necessary. Readings may include Denise Ferreira da Silva, Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Rizvana Bradley, David Marriott, Rei Terada, Nahum Dmitri Chandler, Fred Moten, and others.