Race: The Adventures of a Concept

Race: The Adventures of a Concept is a Social Science course taught by Falguni A. Sheth.

Course Description
This course will examine a range of philosophical reflections on the concept of race in the recent history of the Western world, and then attempt to connect various early modern discourses of race to more contemporary questions of nationality and citizenship. Questions to be considered include some of the following: Why does the term "race" attain a coherence independently of the radically different assumptions we may hold about race? What does race signify? What are the implicit ways in which racial distinctions are manifested conceptually? For what is the term "race" a proxy? What are the political conditions which make race classification possible? How does the way race is framed connect to issues of citizenship, nationalist identity, and distinctions between the "we" v. the "they"? How does "race" manifest itself implicitly in other political issues, i.e. blood, kinship, community, etc., even when the term is not used explicitly? We will read selections by traditional and contemporary philosophers, historians, economists and others. Authors will include some of the following: Plato, Aristotle, Gobineau, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Peter Schuck, David Cole, Linda Alcoff, Bernard Boxill, and others. This course will be theory-, reading-, writing-, and presentation-intensive. This course also dovetailed with an invited speaker series on race and related issues.