Racial Formation Around the World

Catalog description

This course is a comparative sociohistorical inquiry into the bases and mechanisms of racial domination as a “denegated form of ethnicity” anchored in culturally salient (putative) physical differences. Readings include a wide range of sociological, historical, and anthropological studies of ethno-racial vision and division, accommodation, and conflict in Latin America, Asia, Western Europe, the United States, and Africa. They are geared toward helping us uncover the social mechanisms that lead to the rise, reproduction, and transformation of ethno-racial inequality, wherever and whenever it is found. This course is problem-oriented, not group-oriented; its purpose is neither to celebrate nor to denigrate the experiences of this or that particular category but to explain and understand them in sociological terms.