On the Theories and Histories Unit, Spring 2005

As you know, INDS/HIST 220 Introduction to Ethnicity/Race comprises an interdisciplinary approach to race and ethnicity in the United States and other contemporary multiethnic/multiracial societies. This semester, the course is divided into three units--theories and histories, experiences and institutions, and fictions and futures--so that we may consider the stakes of conceiving of critical race/ethnicity studies as a comparative, transnational, and postcolonial field of inquiry. This page focuses on the first unit, in which we survey theories of race and ethnicity and analyze several historical case studies in order to recognize and reexamine our own assumptions and habits of thinking. In a mere five weeks, we're going to immerse ourselves in a set of issues that we could easily devote an entire course to examining:

• How should multiethnic studies and critical race/ethnicity studies define its subject matter? What fields of inquiry, what intellectual currents, should inform their approaches to theorizing race and ethnicity?
• What are the origins, functions, effects, and stakes of the ideas or concepts of race and ethnicity? How, why, and with what effects have they changed through time, and from region to region? What is their present status and what ought to be their future?
• Is it better to theorize race and/or ethnicity in terms of myths, illusions, and fallacies, or in terms of ideologies, discourses, and narratives? Should we compare race and/or ethnicity more to relatively arbitrary characteristics like foot size, height, eye color, or hair color, or more to artificial systems like currencies, languages, nation-states, or religions? Why? When? Under what circumstances?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of such projects as race neutrality, color blindness, diversity management, anti-discrimination, anti-racism, multiculturalism, strategic essentialism, and strategic universalism? What are the varieties of liberal, conservative, and radical views on race and ethnicity, and how do they relate to and inform each other, overlap and debate each other?
• What relations can we discern between race and ethnicity and nation, religion, class, gender, sexuality, language, and modernity? How do we track their intersections, think them simultaneously? How do we conceive of them as at once concepts, categories, identities, and social constructions?
• In what ways might exploring the value and stakes of such concepts as alterity, ideology, identification, embodiment, racial formation, racial project, racialization, panethnicity, and polyculturalism suggest new directions for multiethnic studies? How can these concepts shed new light on such classic themes as identity, prejudice, discrimination, race/ethnic relations, immigration, assimilation, acculturation, pluralism, and multiculturalism? On such classic subjects as the origins of modernity, capitalism, slavery, and racism, the age of exploration, the age of revolution, the rise and fall of empires and civilizations, the founding of nations, the movement of peoples? On such classic debates as primordialists vs. instrumentalists, essentialists vs. anti-essentialists, or multiculturalists vs. monoculturalists?
• What should histories that are informed by the comparative, transnational, and postcolonial priorities of critical race/ethnicity studies--of the Atlantic world, the Indian Ocean basin, the relations and connections between the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia--look like, read like, teach like? How can we use such histories to gain new perspectives on the present and future of various groups, regions, societies, and cultures?
• How can we use the theories and histories considered in this unit to help us to recognize and reexamine our own assumptions and habits of thinking with respect to race and ethnicity? To our own identities and self-identifications? To our own families and communities? To our views of ourselves and others?

So the purpose of the first unit is to raise questions and survey theories and histories that will help us look differently at our own histories, communities, and identities and help us identify and reexamine assumptions about race and ethnicity or habits of thinking about race and ethnicity that we may not have been aware of holding. Given that we could do a course or two on this unit's subjects alone and that we have two other units in this course, it's important to keep the first unit's purpose in mind. Rather than attempt a comprehensive overview, we're doing a quick survey of theories and historical case studies that may help us look at our own times, place, and people differently. We'll be exploring the pros and cons of making historical comparisons and analogies, of considering similarities and differences across eras and regions, of using the past to shed new light on the present. The next two units should 'read' differently as a result of the work we do in this first unit--and your Identification Project should, as well, by the time you turn in the revision.

If you are interested in these questions--or any of the issues raised by the two-week mini-unit on theories of race and ethnicity and the three-week mini-unit on histories of race and ethnicity--the following reserve readings may be the best starting place to develop those interests further.

Theories of Race and Ethnicity

• Les Back and John Solomos, eds., Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader
• Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities
• Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
• Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, eds., The Idea of Race
• Kum-Kum Bhavnani, ed., Feminism and "Race"
• Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement
• Richard Dyer, White
• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks
• Steve Fenton, Ethnicity
• E. Nathaniel Gates, ed., Cultural and Literary Critiques of the Concepts of Race
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., "Race," Writing, and Difference
• Paul Gilroy, Against Race
• David Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning
• --, ed., Anatomy of Racism
• -- and John Solomos, eds., A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies
• Kenneth Mostern, Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth-Century America
• Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed.)
• Werner Sollors, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity
• --, ed., Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader
• John Stone and Dennis Rutledge, eds., Race and Ethnicity: Comparative and Theoretical Approaches
• Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America
• Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science
• Julie Ward and Tommy Lott, eds., Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays
• Naomi Zack, Race and Mixed Race

Histories of Race and Ethnicity

• Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race
• Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954
• Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars
• F. James Davis, Who Is Black? One Nation's Definition
• George Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race
• --, The Black Image in the White Mind
• E. Nathaniel Gates, ed., Racial Classification and History
• Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe
• Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
• Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America
• Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West
• Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny
• Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White
• Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
• George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness
• Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law
• Wahneema Lubiano, ed., The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain
• Joanne Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers
• David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness
• --, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
• Paula Rothenberg, ed., Race, Class, and Gender in the United States (4th ed.)
• Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic
• Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, eds., Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature
• Joseph Skerrett, Jr., ed., Literature, Race and Ethnicity: Contesting American Identities
• Audrey Smedley, Race in North America
• Frank Snowden, Before Color Prejudice
• Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature

Of course, even these works should be considered as different holes through a fence that provide access to a broad field, or as a variety of ports that provide entry to a vast ocean. There are long, rich, and ongoing histories to inquiries into the racialization of slavery, the formation of a white working class, the consequences of colonialism, the processes and effects of globalization, and many more of the topics we're considering in this unit. I encourage you to use your reflective essays to prepare yourself for both the Identification Project revision and the Final Project proposal, both of which will allow you to dig deeper or sail further into theories and histories of race and ethnicity.

INDS/HIST 220: Introduction to Ethnicity/Race, Spring 2005
Created: 2/15/05 11:23 pm
Last modified: 2/22/05 2:23 pm