Race in the Americas: Making and Unmaking Citizenship

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

How have ideas of race and belonging shaped the formation of modern nation-states across the Americas? This course examines the entanglement of race, law, and citizenship from the age of independence to the present. Drawing on cases from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America, we explore how legal institutions both perpetuated/produced racial hierarchies and became key sites of struggle for freedom and recognition. Through historical and sociological perspectives, we trace the evolution of concepts such as freedom, personhood, property, and citizenship, while attending to the ways Black and Indigenous peoples have challenged and redefined them. Grounded in Africana thought and comparative historical analysis, the course invites students to connect early postcolonial state formation to contemporary debates about migration, policing, and racial democracy. Readings combine primary legal texts with scholarship from critical perspectives to illuminate how the racialized state has been made—and remade—across time and space.