COML 4353 - Race and Critical Theory

(crosslisted) GOVT 4356
(CA-AS, ALC-AS)

Spring. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Co-meets with COML 6353/GOVT 6356.

P. Vaziri.

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. 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 of the aesthetic, and engagement with postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, indigenous studies, and the Black radical tradition. Some familiarity with key figures and ideas in postcolonial studies and Black studies is desirable, but not necessary. Readings will include Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten, Kathryn Yusoff, Tiffany Lethabo King, Ronald Judy, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.