Course No: 350:595
Index #: 17958
Distribution Requirement: A5, B, C
Wednesdays - 3:50 PM
MU 305
Comparative Racialization
Robolin, Stephane
Following the October 2008 PMLA special issue with the same title, this theory course will place race at the center of comparative cultural and literary analyses. It will offer an extended inquiry into the variety of ways we may understand certain constructions of race in relation to others. As such, it will pose several questions: What value lies in thinking about racial formations and identities, not in isolation but in relation to others, across time or place? What do we gain by reading race comparatively, and what do we risk or lose? To what or to whom do we have a responsibility as critical thinkers? What is the rationale and/or motive for comparison, and how do these shape the very enterprise itself?
This course structures comparative racialization in two primary ways. The first focuses synchronically on relationships between racial groups across different geographies and histories to consider their similarities and differences—and to discern what those similarities and differences reveal about race and relation. This approach includes transnational blackness, comparative indigeneities, Afro-Asian relationships, and other cross-racial solidarities. The second sense of comparative racialization involves exploring how the “same” regimes of race change diachronically. We’ll additionally take up ways that race is compared to other categories of social difference, including gender, sexuality, and class—which will tie into queer of color critique, feminist studies, and critical race theory.
We will survey scholars’ assessments of comparison’s limitations and possibilities as well as their own approaches to responsibly and productively comparing within or between racial formations. This will enable us to settle on the most generative models of our own projects, large or small. The course will draw from a range of scholarship, likely including selections from PMLA and from edited volumes, such as Lionnet and Shih’s Minor Transnationalisms, Feldman’s Comparison, Clarke and Thomas’s Globalization and Race, and Soske and Jacobs’ Apartheid Israel. It will also feature whole or partial monographs that may include Edward’s The Practice of Diaspora, Jaji’s Africa in Stereo, Byrd’s The Transit of Empire, Bald’s Bengali Harlem, Schleitweiler’s Strange Fruit, Mayeri’s Reasoning from Race, Rasberry’s Race and the Totalitarian Century, and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation.
To ground our discussions, we’ll occasionally take up primary creative texts. This will involve reading primary texts comparatively (reading two or more texts in relation to one another) as well as reading primary texts invested in comparison. Reading may include: Gyasi’s Homecoming, Coetzee’s Dusklands, Elhillo’s The January Children, Long Soldier’s Whereas, and Truong’s The Book of Salt.
Course evaluations will be based on regular class participation, online reflections/meditations, class presentations, one midterm paper, and a final paper.