Racialization, Engendering, and Articulation: Theories of Identity Formation

3 units

This course is an opportunity for upper level undergraduate and graduate students to explore theoretical and ethnographic texts, which focus on the social categories of race, class and gender. The purpose of this course is to interrogate our understanding of the MEANING of such human variables across time and space. As the course title implies, we will approach race, gender, and class as processes, and this requires that we focus on their historical and cultural peculiarities. This course asks students to move conceptually from the era of European colonialism and the invention of the modern conception of race to the U.S. Civil War period to the ascension of negritude as well as contemporary times. In a complementary fashion, to assert that, in fact, race, gender, and class do matter, requires students to investigate the diversity and complexity in various places, such as Brazil, Argentina, Martinique, South Africa, and the U.S.