Ethnic Studies
257A: Social Theory
An Analysis of the
Modern Subject
(http://weber.ucsd.edu/~dsilva/257A2005-Syllabus.htm)
225
Ext.: 4 -3405 or by appointment
What are the causes of racial/global subjection? What sort of
social configurations the notions of racial and cultural difference refigure?
What sort of emancipatory strategies – counter-hegemonic discourses and
practices – will more successfully dissipate the effects of racial subjection?
After almost one hundred years of social scientific accounts of
racial subjection, descriptions of post-slavery and post-colonial social
(juridic, economic, and symbolic) configurations, raciality continues to
perform its task, which is to produce social subjects to which the principles –
universality and freedom (self-determination) – said to govern
post-Enlightenment social configurations do not apply.
While a critical analysis of twentieth-century anthropology’s and
the sociology of race relations’ projects would provide an answer (or rather
answers) to this puzzle, in this seminar, we will search further back and
explore the founding texts informing the social scientific arsenal. With the
aid of Michel Foucault’s excavation of modern thought, we will engage in a
critical reading of the philosophical and social scientific formulations of the
figure at the center of post-Enlightenment thought – namely man, the modern subject – seeking to
identify the presuppositions and formulations guiding contemporary renderings
of racial subjection, namely racial and ethnic studies and global/postcolonial
studies.
Weekly e-mail
comments (1,500 words) 40%
Discussion
mediation 30%
Participation 30%
Email Responses Guidelines
Each week you will email to everyone
in the class a 1,500 word-long response to the assigned readings. In your
response, you should: (a) identify the text(s)’s main concepts and formulations
and (b) at least three questions (for discussion) which seek to clarify whether
and how the conceptual framework developed by a given theorist informs our
understanding of racial/global subjection.
Itinerary
I. The Critical
Analytical Position
Week One (September
22): Introduction
Week Two (September
29)
Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth
Omi & Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States
Week Three (October
6) & Four (October 13)
Foucault’s The Order of Things
II. Founding Writings
Week Five (October
20)
Locke’s The Second Treatise of Civil Government (Selections) [online] & Kant’ Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals [online]
Week Six (October 27)
Herder’s Philosophical Writings (Selections) & Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History [online]
III. Social Scientific Re-formulations
Week Seven (November
3)
Marx’s The German Ideology (Part I) and Grundrisse (Introduction) [online]
Freud’s Outline of Psychoanalysis & The Interpretation of Dreams (Chapter 6) [online]
Week Eight (November10)
Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society & Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Introduction & Conclusion)
Week Nine (November
17)
Weber’s Economy and Society (Selections) & The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism
Parsons’ The Evolutions of Societies
Week Ten (December 1)
Wallerstein’s The World System (Introduction and Conclusion)
Cardoso and Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America (Selections)