Colonial Domesticity and Reproductive Relations

Graduate / Professional

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we study the central importance of kinship, family, and domestic labor to the social reproduction of racial colonial processes. Settler colonialism, colonial slavery, overseas empire, and their aftermaths depend not only on the brute force of war, captivity, and occupation; they are also sustained and contested through culture, language, forms of family and household, and the social reproduction of race, gender, intimacy, and filiation. We trace a genealogy of “colonial domesticity” that considers histories of the sexual violation and separation of slave women from their children, compulsory boarding schools for Native Americans, racialized gendered divisions of care labor, transnational Asian adoption, and contemporary migrant detention and family separation; this genealogy also includes alternative forms of kinship, domesticity, generation, and relation. Readings include historical and anthropological studies of colonialism, feminist debates on social reproduction, and literary and visual culture materials by Maria Mies, Ann Laura Stoler, Silvia Federici, Tithi Bhattacharya, Ruha Benjamin, Kalindi Vora, Thavolia Glymph, Saidiya Hartman, Dorothy Roberts, Audra Simpson, Jodi Byrd, Amy Kaplan, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Laura Briggs, Elizabeth Freeman, Chandan Reddy, Alys Weinbaum, Louise Erdrich, Mary Prince, Toni Morrison, Patricia Powell, Chang-rae Lee, Octavia Butler, and others. Permission of the instructor required. W 4pm-5:55pm