Race, Ethnicity, and Migration: A Transatlantic History

3 units

This course interrogates the making and re-making of racial and ethnic categories in the long history of transatlantic migration from the 1850s to the present. We will examine how the steady movement of people and ideas between Europe and the United States have shaped the discourses and policies of immigration, social reform, and globalization on both sides of the mighty Atlantic. Students will be exposed to historical processes and discourses which not only affected the racialization of different groups in various nations but also the ways in which those processes and discourses were influenced by events unfolding across vast spaces. Rather than simply working in a comparative modality, students will think relationally and transnationally to explore the material and representational consequences of racial and ethnic politics.